• [Mr. Arthur Lillie]: “Buddha was a religious reformer who died 470 years before the Christian era. The following are some of the results due to the sojourn of this one man upon earth:—

1. The most formidable priestly tyranny that the world had ever seen, crumbled away before his attack, and the followers of Buddha were paramount in India for a thousand years.
2. The institution of caste was assailed and over-turned.
3. Polygamy was for the first time pronounced immoral, and slavery condemned.
4. Woman, from being considered a chattel and a beast of burden, was for the first time considered man’s equal, and allowed to develop her spiritual life.
5. All bloodshed, whether with the knife of the priest or the sword of the conqueror, was rigidly forbidden.
6. Also, for the first time in the religious history of mankind, the awakening of the spiritual life of the individual was substituted for religion by body corporate. It is also certain that Buddha was the first to proclaim that duty was to be sought in the eternal principles of morality and justice, and not in animal sacrifices and local formalities invented by the fancy of priests.
7. The principle of religious propagandism was for the first time introduced with its two great instruments, the missionary and the preacher.
8. By these, India, China, Japan, and Bactria (i.e., the present Balkh region, in Northern Afghanistan, the legendary birthplace of the prophet Zoroaster), were proselytised; and the Buddhist missionaries overran Persia and Egypt. This success was effected by moral means alone, for Buddhism is the one religion virgin of coercion. It is reckoned that one-third of humanity is still in its fold (i.e., in 1883).

That such results should have been achieved is one of the greatest marvels of history; and when an inquirer consults some of the best-known writers to try and get an explanation of this unusual missionary success, the marvel increases. We see Buddhist holy men exhibiting a self-denial worthy of the early Christians, to gain an “immortality”⁽*⁾ which is said to mean death {N.B.: to gain immortality [‘amata-patta’/ ‘amṛta-prāsana’] means death of the ego-self [‘sakkāya-nirodha’] not death of self in toto}. We see prayers and sacrifices to a non-god, and gorgeous temples scooped patiently out of rocky mountains in his honour. Statues of this non-god are scattered broadcast over half the globe, and the tolerant patience and activity of his missionaries is unique in the history of religions. This is the bewildering Buddhism of popular treatises; and the activity of one special writer has contributed largely to foster these ideas.
⁽*⁾Amṛita, non-death.
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Dr. Rhys Davids is a very hard-working Pâli scholar. I consider that students of Buddhism are much indebted to him for his translations. But he is a confused and untrained thinker. In treatises, in lectures, in encyclopaedias, in magazines, and in the weekly press, he is constantly putting forth an aspect of Buddhism which it will be the special object of this work to assail. Stated concisely, his position is this:—

1. Buddha preached flat atheism.
2. He taught, “in a complete and categorical manner”, that man has no “soul nor anything of any sort that exists in any manner after death”.
3. He despised mysticism, and disbelieved in anything outside of the world of matter”.
4. This Buddhism is to be found in its original purity solely in the sacred books of Ceylon, a literature which, if translated into English, would be four times as long as our Bible. These sacred books, according to the Cingalese chronicles, were made canonical three months after Buddha’s death, and “re-affirmed” at a convocation summoned by King Aśoka, B.C. 250.
5. In the north of India, about the commencement of the Christian era, an innovating Buddhism arose which proclaimed a belief in God. It was called the Buddhism of the “Great Vehicle”, in contradistinction to the original Buddhism of the “Little Vehicle”, which denied God and a future life entirely . Ceylon has never known anything of this innovating faith.

As opposed to this, I shall show:—
1. That according to the express declaration of Hwen Thsang, the celebrated Chinese pilgrim who visited India at a time when the controversy between the disciples of the Great and Little Vehicles was furiously raging, the Buddhism of Ceylon was the Buddhism of the Great Vehicle.
2. According to the same authority, the disciples of the Little Vehicle called sarcastically the innovating Great Vehicle “Śunya pushpa” (“The Carriage that drives to the Great Nowhere”). They said that this agnostic Buddhism did not come from Buddha. And Hwen Thsang confesses that it was due chiefly to Vasubandhu and Asangha, who, about the date of the Christian era, received it in visions from Maitreya, the Coming Buddha. Dr. Rhys Davids has plainly shuffled the two Buddhisms together.
3. I shall show also that King Aśoka, far from “re-affirming” the colossal library of Cingalese books, knew nothing at all about them. On the Bairât Rock he has given a totally different list of seven short tractates that his monks were then to begin to learn by heart. These and his profession of faith were to be recited at his stupa temples, and nothing else. “Confess and believe in God!” was the motto of Aśoka⁽*⁾. “Confess and disbelieve in God!” seems the motto of Cingalese Buddhism.
⁽*⁾Dhauli inscription.
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4. The Buddhists call their religion Prajñâ Pâramitâ, which means literally the “Wisdom of the Other Bank”.

At an early date the Āryas of India believed in a world of ghosts. This world had for chief one Yama, the Indian Adam. Once he was the first-born of the living, then he became the first-born of the dead. His kingdom, Yamâlaya, was girt by a mighty river, the Vaitaranî. This stream the ghosts of good men traversed, not in Charon’s boat, but by holding on to the tail of the sacred cow, as the Hindoos, aided by cattle, traverse rivers to this day. The domains of Yama were erected by the celestial architect, Viśwa Karma; and at first they were lovely rather than hateful. In the Mâhibhârata it is announced that fear of enemies is not known by the good, nor hunger, nor scarcity, nor sorrow, nor bodily pain. Mountains of excellent food are piled up for the virtuous. These negative advantages would strike the poor Ārya struggling on earth with hunger, sickness, and the dread of being offered up to Rudra by a successful enemy. Palaces and jewelled wives were promised also. The terrible red-hot iron female who embraced the lustful man, and the grotesque swollen belly that was to be the future of the glutton, were after ideas. The earlier Yama lived in a palace. The later Yama had a terrible mace (i.e., “a heavy war club with a spiked head”), red eyes and garments, and extra-sized teeth. He kept a recording angel, “He who paints in secret”. “Pits filled with devouring worms and insects and fire” were prepared for the evil-doing Hindû.

This places us in a better position to settle whether Buddhism, or the “Wisdom of the Other Bank”, was occupied with this world alone or with the other. In point of fact. Buddhism, like the philosophy of the Vedas and the Vedantic school, has always been a pure idealism. Let us turn to the treatise named Prajñâ Pâraraitâ (the “Wisdom of the Other Bank”) to see what Buddha said on the subject. In speaking to his senior disciple, Śâriputra, he said that ignorant men “represent to themselves all things, of which in truth not one has any existence, as existent”; and a little further on, he explained that the appearances of the phenomenal world were “as if a clever magician, or the pupil of a clever magician, caused a vast concourse of men to appear at a cross-road where four great thorough-fares meet, and having caused them to appear, caused them again to vanish”.

I think it is very patent, from the “Hibbert Lectures”, that the perversions of Dr. Rhys Davids are due to his sympathies with Comtism⁽*⁾; but I contend that the study of an ancient religion is not philosophy, but pure history.
⁽*⁾Auguste Comte’s positivistic philosophy proposes that metaphysics and theology should be replaced by a hierarchy of sciences from mathematics at the base to sociology at the top; both “positivism” and “logical positivism” are a form of empiricism which bases all knowledge on perceptual experience and not on intuition or revelation.
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I think that signs of a juster appreciation of the great reformer are already patent. Mr. Edwin Arnold has a “firm conviction that a third of man-kind would never have been brought to believe in blank abstractions or in Nothingness as the issue and Crown of Being”.

The Rev. Professor Beal, too, has uttered a protest against the ‘lectures and articles’ of Dr. Rhys Davids, which against all evidence announce that Buddhism ‘teaches atheism, annihilation, and the non-existence of soul’”.
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The rise of Buddhism cannot be understood unless we can represent to ourselves, even imperfectly, the earlier condition and fortunes and some mental conceptions of the people amongst whom it rose.
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• [Editorial Note]: It is quite mind-boggling to consider that someone speaking for the High Church of England is of the opinion that unless he gathers historical information about “some mental conceptions” of Indian people circa 450 BCE he is not going to understand “the rise of Buddhism” amongst English people circa 1900 CE.

Quite simply, the peoples of antiquity had an entirely different mindset to the people of modernity—as is evidenced by their world-model, for example, in which ākāsa (i.e., ‘aether’, the etheric realm, a.k.a. the firmament, the empyrean; i.e., ‘the empyreal realm of pure light’), which they located “above the sky”, was their after-death destination; specifically, the “sapta ṛṣi” or “seven rishis” (the region known nowadays as a stellar asterism in the constellation called ‘Ursa Major’)—just as the peoples of the 1880’s ‘modernity’ lived in a “one-galaxy” universe (it was the late 1920’s/ early 1930’s that multiple galaxies became known).

Nor did “the people amongst whom it rose” know that Antarctica existed, or Australasia, the two Americas, Africa, Great Britain—in fact, speaking of ‘Great Britain’, neither did the residents living in those lands either (the “rise of Buddhism” took place in the Sixth Century BCE, some 500-odd years before the Romans arrived on Albion’s shores)—and so on, and so forth, along with all the implications and ramifications involved in and arising out of such a mindset.

Even so (as the anonymous writer is set upon what appears to be a wild-goose chase), then the apposite place from which to obtain such information would be none other than the Buddhist scriptures themselves, in their original language (i.e., the Pāli Canon), as what is depicted therein has been considered, by the persons concerned themselves, to be so sacrosanct as to have been reverently passed-on, initially at least word-intact via regularly-tested-for-accuracy memoriter, over a hundred generations or so.

Also, the Pāli Canon presents a vignette of the countryside, the characters, and the way in which life was lived, pertaining to what was known as the Middle Land (‘majjhima-desa’)—the broad fertile plains surrounding the Ganges and Yamuna rivers during an era more or less contemporaneous to the ending of the Roman Kingdom and the establishment of the Roman Republic—a vignette, moreover, of what would otherwise be a lost-in-the-mists-of-time life and lifestyle.

It is possible to extract word-pictures of the minutiae which makes-up day-to-day village life, some thirty-five lifetimes ago, such as is to be found in Sutta № 65 of the Anguttara Nikāya. Vis.:

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• [Mr. Peter Betts a.k.a. Ajahn Brahmavamso; 1994]: Remember that the point of this exercise is to stop being reborn, to get off the “wheel of rebirth”, Samsara, or as Ven. Sāriputta once answered to a Brahmin who asked what is the true difference between Sukha and Dukkha, “To be reborn (Abhinibbatti) friend is Dukkha. Not to be reborn is Sukha?” ~ (Anguttara, Book of the Tens, Sutta 65).
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Further to the above “the point of this exercise” observation is the way this particular sutta (AN 10.65; Sukha 1 Sutta; PTS: A v 120), amongst many, many others of similar ilk, spells out how being alive is the problem—and an insoluble problem, at that, insofar as life itself is nothing but “dukkha” (i.e., being asunder, apart, away from ‘ākāsa’) through and through—and how the only ‘solution’ is to ensure there be no more “becoming” (‘bhava’) or, put differently, no more palingenesia; i.e., no more life.

This particular sutta, which the senior bhikkhu above references (the reverential title “Ajahn” is the Thai equivalent of the Pāli ‘ācariya’ and refers to a monastic of least ten years seniority), lists just some of the innumerable items which are “dukkha”; to wit: hunger and thirst [‘jighacchā’ & ‘pipāsā’] and, thus, faeces and urine [‘uccāro’ & ‘passāvo’] are “dukkha”; the temperature—be it hot or cold [‘sīta’ & ‘uṇha’]—is “dukkha”; contact [‘samphassa’] with fire [‘aggi’], with the wandering renunciate’s walking stick [‘daṇḍa’], or with a knife [‘sattha’], is “dukkha”; irritating, annoying, angry [‘roseti’] assemblies [‘saṅgamma’] or gatherings [‘samāgamma’] of family [‘ñātī’] and friends [‘mittā’] are also “dukkha”.

Verily, the day-to-day minutiae of being alive is “dukkha”; whereas not being alive, by not again-becoming [‘abhinibbatti’], is “sukha” (when not being alive there is, of course, no such everyday events).

Fundamentally, Mr. Gotama the Sakyan—and thus Buddhism at large (just like virtually all religions promising an after-death salvation)—is anti-life to the core.

Here are several regular online translations. Vis:

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• [Mr. Khristos Nizamis]: “At one time, the Venerable Sāriputta was dwelling near the small village of Nālaka in Magadha. And then, there where Venerable Sāriputta was, there Sāmaṇḍakāni, the wanderer, approached. Having approached, he exchanged greetings with the Venerable Sāriputta. Having exchanged greetings, and courteous talk having passed between them, he sat to one side. Having sat to one side, Sāmaṇḍakāni, the wanderer, said this to Venerable Sāriputta:
‘Now, what, friend Sāriputta, is the pleasant, and what is the painful [‘sukhaṃ, kiṃ dukkhan’]?’
‘Rebirth, friend, is painful [‘abhinibbatti kho dukkhā’]; non-rebirth is pleasant [‘anabhinibbatti sukhā’]. When, friend, there is rebirth, this pain is to be expected: cold and heat, hunger and thirst, excrement and urine, contact with fire, contact with punishment, contact with weapons, and anger caused by meeting and associating with relatives and friends. When, friend, there is rebirth, this pain is to be expected.
When, friend, there is no rebirth, this pleasantness is to be expected: neither cold nor heat, neither hunger nor thirst, neither excrement nor urine, neither contact with fire, nor contact with punishment, nor contact with weapons, and no anger caused by meeting and associating with relatives and friends. When, friend, there is no rebirth, this pleasantness is to be expected’”. ~ (AN 10.65; PTS: A v 120; Pathama Sukha Sutta: First Discourse on the Pleasant).
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• [Ms. Upalawanna Galle]: “Once venerable Sāriputta was living in a village of reeds [!sic!][‘nālakagāma’][‘nālaka’ + ‘gāma’ = ‘hamlet of basket-makers’; ‘hamlet of reed-weavers’] in Magadha. Then the wandering ascetic Sāmaṇḍakā, approached venerable Sāriputta, exchanged friendly greetings, sat on a side and said:
‘Friend, future birth is unpleasant [‘abhinibbatti kho dukkhā’] and no birth in the future is pleasant [‘anabhinibbatti sukhā’].
“Friend, when there is future birth, these unpleasantnesses should be expected.—Cold, heat, hunger, thirst, excrement, urination, the touch of fire, punishment, the touch of a weapon, relations and friends get together and make a fuss. Friend, when there is future birth, these unpleasantnesses should be expected.
Friend, when there is no future birth, these pleasantnesses should be expected.—Not cold, no heat, not hungry, not thirsty, no excrement, no urination, not the touch of fire, no punishments, not the touch of a weapon, and relations and friends do not get together and make a fuss. Friend, when there is no future birth, these pleasantnesses should be expected’”. ~ (Aṅguttara Nikāya; 007. Yamakavaggo—Twin Section; 5. Paṭhamasukhasuttaṃ—65. First on Pleasantness).
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• [Mr. Frank Woodward]: “Once the venerable Sāriputta was staying among the Magadhese at Nālakagāmaka[1].
«121»Now the Wanderer Sāmandakāni[2] came to see the venerable Sariputta, and on coming to him greeted him courteously and, after the exchange of courtesies and reminiscent talk, sat down at one side. So seated he said:
‘Pray, Sāriputta, your reverence, what is weal and what is woe [‘sukhaṃ, kiṃ dukkhan’]?’
‘Friend, Sāriputta, what is pleasant and what is unpleasant [‘sukhaṃ, kiṃ dukkhan’]?’
‘Your reverence, rebirth[3] is woe [‘abhinibbatti kho dukkhā’], not-rebirth is weal [‘anabhinibbatti sukhā’]. Where there is rebirth, this woe may be looked for: Cold and heat; hunger and thirst; evacuation and urination; contact with fire, the rod, the spear; even one’s own relatives and friends abuse one, when they meet or gather together. Where there is rebirth, your reverence, this woe may be looked for.
But where there is no rebirth this weal may be looked for: No cold and heat; no hunger and thirst; no evacuation and urination; no contact with fire, rod and spear; nor do one’s friends abuse one when they meet or gather together. Where there is not rebirth, your reverence, this woe is not to be looked for’. Footnotes: [1]Also ‘Nālakagāma’—e.g., K.S. iv, 170. It was his native village and he died there, S. v. 161, etc.; [2]At S. iv, 261 ‘Sāmaṇḍaka’, but Sinhalese texts and Commentary ‘Sāmañcakāni’; cf. Brethren, 40. [3]‘Abhinibbatti’”. ~ (pp. 82-83, § v (65). Weal and Woe (a); ‘The Book of the Tens’; “The Book Of The Gradual Sayings (Aṅguttara Nikāya) or More-Numbered Suttas”; Vol. V. ©1936 The Pali Text Society, Oxford).
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Speaking of minutiae, two out of those three translators use the words “punishment” and “weapon(s)” whilst the third uses “the rod” and “the spear” instead—all being possible translations because the Pāli ‘daṇḍa’ and ‘sattha’ can indeed be rendered in that fashion (elsewhere ‘daṇḍa’ + ‘sattha’, collectively, is a way of signifying “arms”, as in “weapons”, in general)—yet Mr. Sāriputta of Upatissa is sitting, talking with Mr. Sāmaṇḍakā the Paribbājaka (i.e., the ‘Wanderer’) and it is known that the members of the Paribbājaka Order carried a walking stick [‘daṇḍa’] with them wherever they went; maybe as a sort of ‘badge of office’, so to speak, if passages as such in the Vinaya Piṭaka “Cullavagga” are something to go by.

Now, because of the rather disparate and random nature of this list of items which are “dukkha” it is more than likely that Mr. Sāriputta of Upatissa was gesturing at Mr. Sāmaṇḍakā the Paribbājaka’s walking stick, when speaking of “contact” [‘samphassa’], and especially so as he had already mentioned contact with fire [‘aggisamphassa’]—perhaps a cooking fire nearby to where they are seated—and then added contact with a knife [‘satthasamphassa’] to his listing (maybe a vegetable-cutting knife being used in conjunction with that proposed cooking fire).

This is suggested because they are in the hamlet—a small village of basket-makers/ reed-weavers [‘nālakagāma’]—where Mr. Sāmaṇḍakā the Paribbājaka was born and raised so it is quite likely that hospitality, in the form of food being prepared, is taking place (hence the cooking fire and vegetable knife likelihood), as is customary on the sub-continent to this very day, where hospitality—i.e., the cordial and welcoming reception of or disposition towards strangers or guests—is a byword, rather than talk of “punishment”, “the rod”, “the spear”, and “weapon(s)”.

Hence, then, also hunger and thirst [‘jighacchā’ & ‘pipāsā’]—the first two items on the list—as cooking aromas autonomically stimulate the salivary glands of even the most stoic of ascetics, and, if so, then faeces and urine [‘uccāro’ & ‘passāvo’], items three and four on this listing, are a natural corollary via association of the digestive and evacuative processes with eating and drinking.

And even more to this point: given it is Mr. Sāmaṇḍakā the Paribbājaka’s native hamlet then the listing of assemblies [‘saṅgamma’], or gatherings [‘samāgamma’], of family [‘ñātī’] and friends [‘mittā’] similarly makes it more than likely that his reunion visit ‘back home’, after all his wanderings, had included some irritating, annoying, angry [‘roseti’] words being expressed—about his lifestyle choice, perchance, and, mayhap, from an aged and fretful mother and/or a resentful or nagging ex-wife—regarding his abandonment of their communal cares and concerns.

The allusion to the temperature—hot and cold [‘sīta’ & ‘uṇha’]—could have something to do with the steamy, monsoonal rainy-season being upon them (else why is ‘The Wanderer’ in his native hamlet and not wandering about).

’Tis all mostly conjecture, of course, yet a listing drawn from a quite normal hamlet-life domestic scenario (the writer typing this editorial note spent a few months living the simple life in a very small hamlet in the Himalayas in 1985) seems far more likely than an otherwise out-of-character listing of “punishment”, “the rod”, “the spear”, and “weapon(s)”.

Also, it must be remembered that for far more than just a few peoples, an ordinary everyday life is quite a dreary affair—along with its onerous duties and responsibilities, of course, inasmuch Mr. Sāmaṇḍakā the Paribbājaka is a Brahmin—and well-worth escaping from if only because of that.

One of the many interesting aspects of examining these suttas—and referring always to the original Pāli text to see what is really being conveyed—is the fascinating vignette thus provided of what life was like in rural Bhāratavarṣa, as the Indian Subcontinent was called back then, or Jambudīpa, the fabled name for that ancient landmass (‘jambudīpa’ translates as ‘the island of black-plum’ or ‘the island of rose-apple trees, genus “Syzygium cumini” a.k.a. “Eugenia-jambolana”), somewhere around two and a half millennia ago.

Incidentally, yet quite apropos any fascinated vignettist and similarly their ilk, if a generation be counted as twenty-five years then a hundred generations have reproduced themselves since Mr. Sāmaṇḍakā the Paribbājaka sat in that hamlet asking his question; and if a lifetime be counted per the biblical three-score-and-ten reckoning of vintage then Mr. Sāriputta of Upatissa tendered that ‘life-is-the-pits’ response of his around thirty-five lifetimes ago; and it is anybody’s guess as to how many peoples, down through the ages, have had a hand in faithfully preserving memoriter (i.e., by rote) and reverently passing-on this venerated ‘life-sucks-big-time’ message from the ancients.

Ha! Ain’t life grand!
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• The Rise of Buddhism: Part Three.
• An Examen of “The Rise of Buddhism” Contents.
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