expression. And thus, to quote a classic instance, we find Plato in 'The Republic' describing the erection of temples and the appointment of sacrifices and other ceremonies in honour of the gods,' and 'all the observances which we must adopt in order to propitiate the inhabitants of the other world,' as the most momentous, the most august, and the highest acts of legislation.' Who Manu was, and when he lived, we know not; nor shall we ever pierce the mists of fabling time' which hide that knowledge from us. His name is generally derived from 'man,' 'to know'-to know the meaning of the Veda, that is. He is regarded as the mouthpiece of Brahma, the real giver of the precepts which he delivered—' God spake these words and said.' We may account of him as a sort of Hindu Moses; nor will his laws suffer by comparison with the code ascribed to the Hebrew legislator.

But 'The Laws of Manu,' as we have them, are not wholly the primitive legislation which they profess to be. They are a recast, by a sage called Bhrigu, of a more ancient Dharma. This has been established by Max Müller's weighty and ingenious arguments, now accepted as conclusive by all competent scholars. But there can be little doubt that Max Müller was in error in ascribing so late a date as the fourth century of our era to our present Manu-Smriti, and that Sir Henry Maine, following Max Müller too implicitly, and indeed going beyond him, was led to undervalue it.* Dr Bühler, whose untimely death it is not too much to call an irreparable loss to Sanskrit scholarship, has shown in the Introduction to volume xxv that the Manu-Smriti, as we have it, is regarded as a law-book 'claiming the allegiance of all Aryans, and generally acknowledged by them,' but that it must be considered as merely a new edition of the original text. Dr Bühler is of opinion that 'it certainly existed in the second century A.D., and seems to have been composed between that date and the second century B.C.'; and in this opinion Professor Cowell and Mr Talboys Wheeler concur. For a full discussion of the point we must refer our readers to Bühler's masterly pages. We cannot pass away from them without observing that this edition of his-framed, as he modestly says, on the

translation of Sir William Jones-seems to us to approach as near as possible to perfection. Accurate and ample scholarship is displayed in every line of it. The Introduction is a model of lucid and ingenious criticism; the appendix of quotations from Manu found in other Hindu law-books represents a vast amount of learned labour; and the synopsis of parallel passages from the Dharma-Sutras and Smritis, as well as of the wholly or partially identical verses in the Mahabhārata, Parāsara, Mānava Sraddhakalpa, the Upanishads, and other works, is a masterpiece of erudition.

So much must suffice as to the Brahminical literature translated in the two series of the Sacred Books.' We will now go on to Buddhism. And here we shall put ourselves chiefly under the guidance of that most accomplished and indefatigable scholar, Professor Rhys Davids, who has done more than any one else to reveal to us the secrets of this great religion-the religion for more than two thousand years of half mankind, and still the most widely diffused of the world's creeds. Buddhism, of course, like Christianity, has undergone endless transformations. Of all religions the dictum of Aquinas holds good: 'Quidquid recipitur secundum modum recipientis recipitur.' They are received according to the measure of the recipient; their development varies with the soil into which they are cast. The Buddhism of Thibet is as far removed from the Buddhism of Sakya-Muni as, let us say, the Christianity of Abyssinia from the Christianity of Jesus Christ. The Buddhism of China is very far from identical with the Buddhism of Ceylon. The Buddhism of Japan differs in many very important particulars from the Buddhism of Siam. It is customary, indeed, to speak of two great divisions in Buddhism: to oppose the Buddhism of the Southern Church to the Buddhism of the Northern. But, as Professor Rhys Davids has pointed out, in his 'Hibbert Lectures,' this way of speaking is incorrect. 'There was,' he writes, 'a unity in Southern Buddhism, but there has been no such unity in Northern Buddhism. We may talk, indeed, of Northern Buddhisms, but it would be better to keep the Buddhism of each of the northern countries, in which it has been adopted, separate and distinct, both in our thoughts and in our language.'

6

One reason of the unity once existing-and, indeed, not wholly lost-in Southern Buddhism is that it possesses an authoritative Scripture canon which the North Buddhist churches do not possess. There is every reason to believe,' writes Mr Rhys Davids in his 'Manual,' 'that the PaliPitakas, now extant in Ceylon, are substantially identical with the books of the Southern canon as settled at the Council of Patna about the year 250 B.C.' It is, unquestionably, to these Pitakas that we must go for what is, at all events, the nearest approximation to the teaching of Sakya-Muni and his earliest followers. They are three in number: the Vinaya-Pitaka-Discipline for the Order of Buddhist Monks-which contains five treatises; the Sutta-Pitaka †-Discourses for the Laity-which contains thirteen treatises; and the Abhidhamma, hitherto rendered Metaphysics,' a translation to which Professor Rhys Davids objects on the ground that, as Buddhism does not recognise a soul, it can have no metaphysics. The Abhidhamma-Pitaka contains seven treatises. We should here observe that the word 'pitakas,' which means baskets, is not used, Mr Rhys Davids tells us, in the Sacred Books of the Buddhist canon, and that when it first came into use is unknown. He adds: 'The tertium quid of the comparison is not the basket, or the box, as a receptacle for preservation, but as a means of handing on; as Eastern navvies removing earth put it into baskets and pass them from hand to hand. So the expression "the Three Baskets" does not mean "the three collections," but the three bodies of oral tradition handed down from teacher to teacher.' The three Pali-Pitakas, exclusive of the repetitions in them, which are frequent and long, would occupy about double the space of the English Bible. One tenth of them (speaking roughly) has been translated in the Sacred Books.' Volume x contains Max Müller's

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*The mistake is often made that a Sanskrit Buddhist canon was settled at Kanishka's Council in the first century of our era. See Mr Rhys Davids' remarks, 'Sacred Books,' vol. xxxvi, Int. pp. 15, 16: 'Since that time,' he observes, the rulers of China, Japan, and Tibet have from time to time published collections of Buddhist books; but none of these collections even purports to be a canon of the Scriptures.'

† 'Sutta' is the Pāli equivalent of the Sanskrit 'sūtra.' 'The word,' writes Mr Rhys Davids, 'was adopted by the Buddhists, and used by them in the sense of a discourse, a chapter, a small portion of a sacred book in which, for the most part, some one point is raised and more or less disposed of.'

version of the Dhammapada, sometimes called 'The Paths of Religion,' a most interesting collection of verses, chiefly culled from the Buddhist Scriptures—a sort of hymn-book, Professor Rhys Davids calls it-unquestionably setting forth the fundamentals of the Buddha's doctrine. In this volume is also included Professor Fausböll's translation of the Sutta-Nipata, discourses attributed to the Buddha, which, the Professor remarks, 'no doubt contains some remnants of primitive Buddhism.' In volume xi Professor Rhys Davids gives us seven Suttas, selected by him as containing the most essential, the most original, and the most attractive part of Gotama's teaching'; while, in conjunction with Dr Oldenberg, he also gives us, in volumes xiii, xvii, and xx, a translation of the Vinaya Texts. We further owe to Mr Rhys Davids a translation of 'The Questions of King Milinda,' filling volumes xxxV and xxxvi. This work purports to be a series of conversations between Nagasena, a famous Buddhist sage, and the Bactrian monarch Menander, resulting in that sovereign's conversion. It is not reckoned among the canonical Scriptures of the Southern Church, but we are extremely glad that it has been included in the 'Sacred Books.' The learned translator goes so far as to call it 'the masterpiece of Indian prose, and, indeed, the best book of its class, from a literary point of view, that has been produced in any country.'

Unquestionably, the discovery of this Pāli literature, of which we have been writing, must be ranked among the most considerable achievements of nineteenth-century scholarship. It places before us what Professor Rhys Davids well calls a rounded and complete picture of a new and strange religious movement,' destined, as we have seen, very deeply to affect vast numbers of the human race. How dense was the darkness which shrouded that movement not much more than half a century ago, may be seen from the view of Buddhism taken by the late Mr Maurice in those Boyle Lectures of his to which we have already referred. Struck by its vast extent, he devoted himself, with his usual conscientiousness, to the task of ascertaining the chief facts about it, using the best authorities within his reach. The two chief conclusions to which he was led were that 'Buddhism is Theism in its highest form and conception,' and that

'Thibet must be regarded as its proper centre and home. It was the fate of this memorable man, as Matthew Arnold once observed with gentle banter, 'to spend his life beating the bush with deep emotion, but never starting the hare.' We know now that the hierarchical Buddhism of Thibet is a most extraordinary travesty of the doctrine of the Buddha, and that Theism is the last word which should be employed to describe that doctrine. To say, indeed, as some accomplished scholars have said, that it is atheistic, seems to us inaccurate. Gotama, a Hindu of the Hindus, recognised all the innumerable deities of the Brahminical Pantheon; and his followers adopted, or, at all events, respected, the gods of the countries which they evangelised. Buddhism certainly does not possess the conception of the personal creative God of monotheism, which is the corner-stone of Christianity and of Islām. The idea of creation is foreign to it. A perfect Creator,' one of its most accomplished Japanese clergy once observed to the present writer, could never have called into being so imperfect a world.' How the world came to be, he regarded as a question ultra vires. If we must find in the terminology of the Western world a label for a system based on conceptions very far removed from our ways of thought, we might call Buddhism pantheistic with a tendency to acosmism. The impermanency of all that is constitutes one of its fundamental positions-peî Tà Távra, in a deeper sense than the words bore for the old Hellenic philosopher. Nor is there any way of escaping from 'the whirlpool of existence,' 'the yawning gulf of continual birth and death,' save by rooting out desire, the very source of being. In those who have thus attained to the supreme state of Arahatship-the crown of Buddhist saintship—Karma is extinguished and Nirvana, the peace which passeth all understanding, is reached. And these even the gods envy.

This doctrine of Karma, the thought dominating the teaching of the Buddha, is not theological at all, but ethical. As, perhaps, we need hardly explain, it means in substance this-that a man is the outcome of what he has done in his actual or previous existences; that the real man is the net result of his merits and demerits; and that upon his deeds in this life, together with his past, depends his destiny in the future life to which he will be reborn,