whether as a god, a man, or a beast; for there is no essential difference between living beings. The character of his deeds is determined by his intention. All that we are,' the Buddha insists, in a text the genuineness of which seems not open to doubt, 'depends upon what we have thought.' Of course this doctrine was nothing new. It was deeply rooted in the Hindu mind when Gotama began to preach and to teach. The new element in the Buddha's teaching was his conception of knowledge. He placed it, not-like earlier Hindu sages-in apprehension of an Absolute, but in a clear conception of the facts of the three worlds, earth, heaven, and hell; or, in other words, in discernment of the true character of the universal law of righteousness ruling throughout those three worlds and supreme over all beings, animal, human, and divine. It is by conformity to this law-sometimes emphatically called the Truth-that deliverance, whether partial or entire, from the evil inseparable from individual existence is to be gained. And so in the priceless book of 'Jātaka Tales'-the oldest collection of folk-lore in the world, and the most fascinating-we read that upon one occasion 'the Blessed One, opening his lotus mouth, as if he were opening a jewel-casket, scented with heavenly perfume and full of sweet-smelling odours, sending forth his pleasant tones,' spake thus: Life according to the Truth confers the three happy conditions of existence here below, and the six joys of the Brahmalokas in the heaven of delight, and finally leads to the attainment of Arahatship; but life according to the Untruth leads to rebirth in the four hells, and among the five lowest grades of man.' This is the central thought of the Buddha's teaching. For the first time in the history of the world,' Mr Rhys Davids observes, 'Buddhism proclaimed a salvation which each man could gain for himself, and by himself, in this world, during this life, without having the least reference to God or gods, either great or small.'

For two centuries and a half after the death of the Buddha, which event Mr Rhys Davids places within a few years of 500 B.C., his religion, which was regarded merely as a sect of Hinduism, was confined to a portion of the valley of the Ganges. Then an event took place which transformed it into a world-religion-the conversion of the great King Asoka. The consequences of that event Vol. 195.-No. 390.

2 B

became apparent at once. In India, where stately monasteries arose on all sides, Buddhism became the fashionable religion; and missionaries were sent by the king to all the countries not under his sway between Kashmir and Ceylon, a son and daughter of his own being among them. As time went on, the new faith penetrated to Nepal, Thibet, China, Japan, and Mongolia; and as it spread, it underwent those transformations above referred to, upon which we cannot here enter, in the various lands where it was naturalised. In the two series of the 'Sacred Books' before us, the Northern Buddhisms are represented by Dr Kern's translation from the Sanskrit of the Saddharma Pundarika, The Lotus of the True Law' (volume xxi); by Mr Beal's translation from the Chinese of the Fo-sho-hing-tsan King (volume xix), the Chinese text being itself a translation from the Sanskrit, executed in A.D. 420; and by versions from the Sanskrit of certain philosophical treatises of an extremely Pyrrhonist character (volume xlix) contributed by Professor Max Müller, Professor Cowell, and Mr Takakusu. All these works belong to the school of the Mahāyāna, or Greater Vehicle, a school which-to speak merely of its fundamental characteristic-holds up Buddhaship instead of Arahatship as the goal at which every good Buddhist should aim. It is in Thibet that this new doctrine has obtained its fullest and most fantastic development, so that there (to quote once more from Mr Rhys Davids) 'Buddhism, or rather Llamaism, has come to be the exact contrary of the earlier Buddhism.'

Closely akin to Buddhism is Jainism: indeed some scholars among them Lassen-have held it to be merely a form or transformation of Buddhism, so much have the two religions in common. But this opinion is warmly controverted by Herr Jacobi in his Introduction to volume xxii of the Sacred Books,' which, together with volume xlv, contain his translation from the Prakrit of certain Gaina-Sutras. This learned man thinks the origin of the extant Gaina literature cannot be placed earlier than 300 B.C.,' or two centuries after the date which he assigns to the rise of the sect. It is a somewhat extensive literature, being comprised, as Rajendralala Mitra tells us, in fifty different works, partly in Sanskrit, partly in Maghadī Prākrit. The Jains do not now number

6

more than a million and a half, but among them are some of the wealthiest and most cultivated natives of India. Their cities of temples at Palitāna and Girnar, in Gujerat and at Mount Abu, are among the choicest gems of Indian architecture; and some magnificent fanes have recently been erected by them in Calcutta.

It is curious that the age of Sakya-Muni should have been also the age of three other great religious teachers whose importance in the history of the world is second only to his-Zoroaster,* Confucius, and Laotze-and also of the sage whom we must account the founder of Hellenic philosophy and the intellectual father of the Western world, Pythagoras. We will proceed to speak briefly of the contribution made by the 'Sacred Books' to the religion of the first-named of these illustrious men, the great religion of the Magi, once the dominant creed of a vast empire, now almost extinct in its primitive home and represented chiefly by the handful of Parsis-they number only some 100,000-resident, for the most part, in the Bombay Presidency; a creed which, if the issue of the battle of Marathon had been different, might have been the creed of modern Europe.

The rediscovery of Zoroastrianism, as of Buddhism, is a conquest of the modern mind, belonging, however, not to the nineteenth century, but to the eighteenth. So far ago as the year 1700 Thomas Hyde, an Oxford professor, esteemed the greatest Orientalist of his time, made an attempt, in his learned work, Veterum Persarum et Parthorum et Medorum Religionis Historia,' to restore the history of the old faith of Iran. His method--an excellent one in itself-was 'to combine the accounts of the Mohammedan writers with the true and genuine monuments of ancient Persia.' Unfortunately, he did not so much as know-such knowledge was not possible thenwhat 'the true and genuine monuments of ancient Persia' are. In the place of them he employed recent compilations relating to the last stage of Parsiism. The thickness of the darkness in which he painfully groped his devious way may be inferred from the chief conclusions at which

* Many widely differing dates have been assigned to Zoroaster, but this seems the most probable of them.

he arrived. They were these-that the Persians must have been converted from idolatry by Abraham; that their fire-altars were imitations of the altar in the Jewish temple; that Magism was a Sabæan corruption of the primeval faith; that Zoroaster was a disciple of the exiled Jews in Babylon. It is easy now to expose these absurdities: it is not easy to overrate the debt of sound learning to the indefatigable pioneer who fell into them. Dr Darmesteter justly observes that Hyde's book was the first true and complete picture of modern Parsiism, and that it made inquiry into its history the order of the day.'

But it was not until half a century later that the real founder of Zend scholarship appeared.

In 1754,' writes Dr Darmesteter, 'a young man, twenty years old, Anquetil Duperron, a scholar of the École des Langues Orientales in Paris, happened to see a facsimile of four leaves of the Oxford Vendīdād, which had been sent from England, a few years before, to Étienne Fourmont, the Orientalist. He determined at once to give to France both the books of Zoroaster and the first European translation of them. Impatient to set off, without waiting for a mission from the government which had been promised to him, he enlisted as a private soldier in the service of the French East India Company. He embarked at Lorient on the 24th of February, 1755, and after three years of endless adventures and dangers through the whole breadth of Hindustan, at the very time when war was raging between France and England, he arrived at last in Surat, where he stayed among the Parsis for three years more. Here began another struggle, not less hard, but more decisive, against that mistrust and ill-will among the Parsis which had disheartened Fraser; but he came out of it victorious, and succeeded at last in winning from the Parsis both their books and their knowledge. He came back to Paris on the 14th of March, 1764, and deposited, on the following day, at the Bibliothèque Royale the whole of the Zend-Avesta, and copies of most of the traditional books. He spent ten years in studying the material he had collected, and published in 1771 the first European translation of the Zend-Avesta.'

Anquetil Duperron's translation was received by Oriental scholars generally with incredulity of a kind by no means polite. The Persian lexicographer, Richardson, a plodding and ponderous scholar, thought that he had.

been imposed upon by Parsi priests, who had palmed off upon his simplicity documents which were manifest forgeries. Meiners and Tychsen, whose opinions carried great weight, at first judged likewise. Sir William Jones overwhelmed the translator and his work with persiflage of a Voltairean kind, expressed in French which would not have disgraced Voltaire. But

"Time that solves all doubt

By bringing Truth, his glorious daughter, out,'

has amply vindicated Anquetil Duperron. The documents which he translated are undoubtedly genuine, though his translation is often far from expressing their true sense; which is not surprising, seeing that he possessed neither grammar nor dictionary of the Zend language. The real founder of Zend philology was the illustrious Eugène Burnouf; but, as Dr Haug justly observes, 'he could never have succeeded in laying the foundation without Anquetil's labours.'

The term, religion of Zoroaster,' is, we should note, misleading. Its accredited teachers, of course, desire to place it before us as a complete system revealed by Ahuramazda to that prophet, just as-to quote some remarks of Max Müller's in his Hibbert Lectures '-'most of the writers on the Old Testament . . . wish to place the religion of the Jews before us as ready-made from the beginning, as perfect in all its parts, because revealed by God, and, if liable to corruption, at all events incapable of improvement. But,' he continues, that the Jewish monotheism was preceded by a polytheism "on the other side of the flood and in Egypt," is now admitted by most scholars; nor would it be easy to find in the same sacred code two more opposite sentiments than the rules and regulations for burnt offerings in Leviticus, and the words of the Psalmist (li, 16): "For thou delightest not in sacrifice, else would I give it thee; thou delightest not in burnt offerings. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise."

There is growth here, as evident as can be, however difficult it may seem to some students of religion to reconcile the idea of growth with the character of a revealed religion. . . . Minute scholarship only has been able to discover some older elements in the Gathas; but