English
Buddhism, up to the time of A6oka, was but one out of many sects esta- blished in India. There had been as yet no schism, but only controversy, such as we find in the Brfi^h- raanas themselves between different schools and par- ties. There were as yet no Brahmans as opposed to RISE OF BUDDHISM. 261 Buddhists, in the later sense of the word. No separa- tion had as yet taken place, and the greatest reformers at the time of Buddha were reforming Brahmans. This is acknowledged in the Buddhist writings, though they probably were not written down before A6oka*s Council. But even then Buddha is represented as the pupil of the Brahmans, and no slur is cast on the gods and the songs of the Veda. Buddha, according to his own canonical biographer, learned the Rig- veda and was a proficient in all the branches of Brahmanic lore. His pupils were many of them Brahmans, and no hostile feeliug against the Brah- mans finds utterance in the Buddhist Canon. This forms a striking contrast with the sacred literature of the Jains. The Jains, who are supposed to have made their peace with the Brahmans, yet in their sacred works, written towards the beginning of the fifth cen- tury A.D., treat their opponents with marked disrespect. Their great hero Mah&vira, though at first conceived by a Brahman woman, is removed from her womb and transferred to the womb of a Kshatriya woman, for " surely," as Sakko (Indra) says\ " such a thing as this has never happened in past, happens not in present, nor will happen in future time, that an Arhat, a Chakravarti, a Baladeva, or a Yasudeva should be born in a low caste family, a servile family, a degraded family, a poor family, a mean family, a beggar's family, or a Brahman's family ; but, on the contrary, in all time, past, present, and to come, an Arhat, a Chakravarti, a Vasudeva, receives birth in a noble family, an honourable family, a royal family, a Kshatriya family, as in the family of Ikshv&ku, or the Harivan^a, or some such family of pure descent." 1 Ealpa-sutra, p. 35. t 3 '( 262 RISE OF BUDDHISM. Now this is mere party insolence, intelligible in the fifth century a. d., when the Brahmans, as a party, were re-establishing their hierarchical sway. Nothing of the kind is to be found in the canonical books of the Buddhists. Buddha had his opponents, and among them chiefly the Tirthakas ; but so had all eminent sages of whom we read in the Brd.hmanas. But Buddha had also his friends and followers, and they likewise were Brahmans and Rishis ; some of them accepted his doctrines, not excluding the abolition of caste. Buddhism, in its original form, was only a modifica- tion of Brahmanism. It grew up slowly and imper- ceptibly, and its very founder could hardly have been aware of the final results of his doctrines. Before the time that Buddhism became a political power, it had no history, no chronology, it hardly had a name. We hear nothing of Bauddhas in the Br&hmanas, though we meet there with doctrines decidedly Bud- dhistic. The historical existence of Buddhism be- gins with Afioka, and the only way to fix the real date of Ak)ka is by connecting him with Chandro- gupta, his second predecessor, the Sandrocottus of the Greeks. To try to fix it according to the early Buddhist chronology would be as hopeless as fixing the date of Alexander according to the chronology of the Purftnas. It is possible to discover in the decaying literature of Vedic Brahmanism the contemporaneous rise of a new religion, of Buddhism. Every attempt to go beyond, and to bring the chronology of the Buddhists and Brahmans into harmony has proved a failure. The reason, I believe, is obvious. The Brahmans had a kind of vague chronology in the difierent capitals of their country. They remembered the names of their kings, and they endeavoured to remember the years CHBONOLOQY. 263 of their reigns. But to note the year in which an individual, duch as Gautama l§&kyasinha, was born, however famous he may have been in his own neigh- bourhood or even in more distant Parishads, would have entered as little into their thoughts as the Komans, or even the Jews, thought of preserving the date of the birth of Jesus before he had become the founder of a religion. Buddha's immediate followers may have recollected and handed down, by oral com- munication, the age at which Buddha died ; the age of his disciples too may have been recollected, to- gether with the names of some local Rajas who pa- tronised Buddha and his friends; but never, until the adoption of Buddhism as the state religion by Aioka, could there have been any object in connect- ing the lives of Buddha and his disciples with the chronology of the Solar or Lunar Dynasties of India. When, at the time of A^oka, it became necessary to give an account of the previous history of Buddhism, the chronology then adopted for the early centuries of that faith was necessarily of a purely theoretical kind. We possess more than one system of Bud- dhist chronology, but none of them can be considered authentic with regard to the times previous to A6oka, the second successor of Chandragupta. There is the system of the Southern Buddhists, framed in Ceylon ; there are the various systems of the Northern Bud- dhists, prevalent in Kepal, Tibet, and China ; and the system of the Pur&nas, if system it can be called, in which S&kya is made the father of his father, and grandfather of his son. To try to find out which of these chronological systems is the most plausible seems useless,* and it can only make confusion worse confounded if we attempt a combination of the B 4 264 CHRONOLOGY. three. It has been usual to prefer the chronology of Ceylon, which places Buddha's death in 543 b.c. But the principal argument in favour of this date is extremely weak. It is said that the fact of the Cey- lonese era being used as an era for practical purposes speaks in favour of its correctness. This may be true with regard to the times after the reign of A&oka. In historical times any era, however fabu- lous its beginning, will be practically useful; but no conclusion can be drawn from this, its later use, as to the correctness of its beginning. As a conventional era, that of Ceylon may be retained, but until new evidence can be brought forward to substantiate the autlienticity of the early history of Buddhism as told by the Ceylonese priests, it would be rash to use the dates of the Southern Buddhists as a corrective standard for those of the Northern Buddhists or of the Brahmans. Each of these chronological systems must be left to itself. They start from diflferent pre- mises, and necessarily arrive at different results. The Northern Buddhists founded their chronology on a reported prophecy of Buddha, that " a thousand years after his death his doctrines would reach the Northern countries-" ^ Buddhism was definitely in- troduced into China in the year 61 a.d. ; hence the Chinese fix the date of Buddha's death about one thou- sand years anterior to the Christian era. The varia- tions of the date, according to different Chinese au- thorities, are not considerable, and may easily be explained by the uncertainty of the time at which Buddhism found its way successively into the various countries north of India, and at last into China. ^ LoBset], Indian Antiquities, ii., p. 58. Schiefoer, Manges Aaiatiquee^ i. 436. CHBONOLOQY. 265 Besides 950 or 949 b.c.^, which are the usual dates assigned to Buddha's death by Chinese authorities, we may mention the years 1130, 1045, 767, for each of which the same claim has been set up. The year 1130 rests on the authority of Tchao-chi, as quoted by Matouanlin in the annals of the Soui.^ Fahian, also, seems to have known this date; for, according to his editor, he placed the death of Buddha towards the beginning of the dynasty Tcheu, and this, according to Chinese chronology, took place in 1122.* In another place, however, Fahian, speaking of the spreading of Buddhism towards the north, places this event 300 years after Buddha's Nirvdna, or in the reign of the Emperor Phing-Wang. As this em- peror reigned 770 — 720, Fahian would seem to have dated the Nirv^a somewhere between 1070 and 1020. The date 767 rests on the authority of Ma- touanlin.^ From Tibetan books no less than fourteen dates have been collected ^ ; and the Chinese pilgrims who visited India found it impossible to fix on any one date as established on solid evidence.