bowl, although there were rich men who could not fill it with many baskets of flowers.[1]
During the famine a certain Pratyeka Buddha got up early one morning, and putting on his robe, took his alms-dish in his hand, and entered the city of Benares, where he begged from door to door. He obtained nothing, so he went home again, washed his alms-bowl, and sat down. Now there was in Benares a certain poor man who had watched the holy man, and seen that he received nothing; so he went to him, and invited him to his house to share all that he had, which was just one measure of coarse cockle-seed. A servant girl, whose mistress had refused to relieve a dirty old man, ugly and graceless, begged her daily portion of meal, and gave it in charity to the man; "for," said she, "in holy men one does not look for comeliness of person, but for purity of heart."
But not only did he preach to the poor and the low-caste, he preached to the rich and the high-caste also, and gathered disciples from all ranks of society. To all he laid down as the characteristic of the "true disciple, the disciple indeed" — "He ministers to the worthy, does harm to none, gives honor to whom honor is due, loves righteousness and righteous conversation, rejoices in meditating on the law, reflects in his life the divine wisdom, practises self-discipline in order to lead a pure and chaste life, always does good to those around him." For one class, indeed, he made special provision — the hermits. Brahmanism had developed by its teaching men who retired from the world under vows of chastity and poverty. Buddha had himself tried their system, and it had failed to give rest and repose to his spiritual being. He now offered to those ascetics the way by which they might escape from the sorrows of life and find spiritual rest. The way of salvation was the same for all men, but for those who desired to live a higher life he provided special "counsels of perfection." Hence there sprang the elaborate conventual system which so keenly exercised the speculation of the early Jesuit missionaries, and which is so powerful to this day in Buddhist countries. The monastic order was bound by vows of celibacy and poverty; but those vows did not bring in themselves merit, they were only to be regarded as a help to the men and women who bound themselves by them. All men and women were admitted without distinction of caste, and no one who was under age was received without the consent of their parents. They were not priests, for they neither offered sacrifice nor prayers. Originally they lived under trees, but they soon assembled in religious houses — the men in monasteries, the women in convents. Their time was spent in meditation, which is the effort of the "true self" to obtain freedom from the trammels of sense. "Cleansed from all personal defilement, the candidate," says Buddha, "comes out of the world, and is truly a homeless one — a disciple indeed." Henceforth he must give himself up to work and chastity, for "the man who has left home to become a shaman, and yet gives way to idleness and sloth, or whose mind hankers after impure indulgence, is like the rotten tree against which the wind blows, which can hardly resist its force, but is soon blown down."[2] To this day the admission of a neophyte is one of the most imposing ceremonies df the Buddhist culte.[3]
The number of inmates in some of the monasteries at the present day is enormous. Hue and Gabet found four thousand at Kounboun. When Father Bury saw the Chinese bonze tonsured, using the rosary, praying in an unknown tongue, and kneeling before images, he said, "There is not a piece of dress, not a sacerdotal function, not a ceremony of the court of Rome, which the devil has not copied in this country;" and the young De Beauvoir says, "What struck me was the outward resemblance of the religious ceremonies of the temples to those of our own religion. A bonze, surrounded with clouds of incense, and dressed in a chasuble of red silk, officiated with great pomp."[4] The rock-cut Buddhist temples of India, which date two hundred years before our era, have a nave, side aisles, and an apse round which the aisle is carried, resembling in form the early Christian churches. The rock-cut monasteries are also earlier in date than the Christian; there are between seven and eight hundred in India, dating from 200 b.c., to 500 a.d.
The wife of Buddha and their son were among the first admissions into the con-
- ↑ Travels of Fa-hian, p. 38.
- ↑ Dhap. xxxiv.
- ↑ The rules of the order are translated in Beal's "Catena," p. 240. The initiation is described by Rhys Davids in "Buddhism," p. 161. The two hundred and fifty monastic rules were translated into Chinese from the Sanskrit about 70 a.d., and are therefore anterior to Christian monasticism ("Catena," p. 189).
- ↑ Voyage, Japan, p. 151.
