THE HOUR AND THE MAN.

THE

HE name "Buddha" is derived from the root budh, to know, and means "enlightened," Name and "wakened out of dreams into certainty." Its date. wide currency, both in history and mythology,1 indicates great energy of spiritual reaction amidst the inertia of Oriental faith. It was the name for mind in all Hindu philosophy, and the title of honor given to the sage. In the Brahmanical as well as the Buddhistic writings, this is a common term for sainthood.2 "The Buddha," like "the Christ," is thus not a personal name, but an official title; yet conveying a less exclusive sense than the latter word has received from Christendom, being applied to innumerable ideal personages, a series reaching through incalculable time.

This latitude in the use of the name is one cause of the differences among Buddhists themselves, as to the epoch of the special Buddha to whom the Hindu religious reformation is referred. The Thibetans have as many as fourteen accounts of the time of his death, ranging between 2422 B.C. and 546 B.C. The Chinese and Japanese insist on the tenth century, and the Singhalese on the sixth. This last date (543 B.C.) substantiated by an agreement

1 Pococke, India in Greece.

among the southern

2 Weber, Vorles., pp. 27, 161.

Buddhists, has been generally accepted by European scholars as approximately correct.1 Yet Müller and Lassen have shown that dogmatic requirements, reputed prophecies, and other errors, have had much to do with fixing the recognized dates, after all.

His Sutras (sentences or discourses) were collected

Written records.

after his death by the earliest synod of his followers.2 But these have been to an extent recast by somewhat later hands, and Müller believes that the story of Buddhism down to its political triumph, in the third century B.C., was supplied out of the heads of its disciples in that epoch, rather than from authentic records.3 Yet, in common with other scholars, he regards the substance of the oldest Sutras as good material for history, accepting the main features of their report of Gotama, notwithstanding Professor Wilson's skepticism even as to his existence. 4 St. Hilaire, following the Lalitavistâra, one of the earliest works of the canon,5 for the period of his youth, and combining various Sutras with the reports of the "Chinese Pilgrims" for that of his ministry, has endeavored to separate truth from fiction, and to present a life of the reformer free from mythological additions, just as Baur, Renan, Schenkel, and others, have sought to eliminate similar tributes of the religious imagination from the records of the life of Jesus. It is manifest, however, that there are even greater difficulties in the way of this effort than in that of extracting pure history from the Christian gospels.

1 Lassen, II. 57-60; St. Hilaire; Burnouf; Weber, Vorles., p. 251. Müller says 477 B.C. See Sansk. Lit., pp. 260-301.

2 Koeppen, II. 10; Lassen, II. 8.

Sansk. Lit., 79, 82; Chips, I. 217, 219.

$ Sansk. Lit., p. 260.

5 Dating beyond all question earlier than the Christian era (St. Hil., Introd, xiv.; Müller, Chips, I. 205), and translated out of Sanskrit into Chinese in the first century of our era.

Of the use of writing for religious purposes in the earliest ages of Buddhism, we have no evi- Writing.

dence. The traditions of the first three coun

cils do not mention it, and the monumental edicts of Aśoka, which belong to the third century B.C., are the oldest inscriptions as yet found in India. "The Tripitaka, or Three Baskets" (the Buddhist Gospels) — comprising Sutras (discourses), Vinaya (discipline), and Abhidharma (metaphysics) - current in the Pâli language in Ceylon, contains much of the oral tradition of the oldest times; but it cannot be referred as a whole to a period previous to the time of Asoka. Of more marked originality is the Nepâlese collection, written in Sanskrit, and in corresponding though not identical divisions. Much of this also shows signs of elaboration, only possible in an advanced stage of monastic life. The Pâli history of Ceylon refers the Tripitaka to the close of the "period of inspiration" (106-74, B.C.). The Dhammapada bears stronger marks of originality, and its sentences are evidently collected from primitive sources. They answer to the logia, which Matthew is reported in early Christian traditions to have preserved, and which, so far as they are discoverable in the gospel now bearing his name, must form our earliest data for the life of Jesus.

That other enlightened persons received the venerated name of "Buddha" in earlier times, and in regions north of India, is very probable. The theory of Buddhism affirms an "apostolic succession," descending from remotest ages; and Gotama himself is quoted in proof of it. The name Tathagata con

1 Burnouf, p. 125; Wassiljew, Le Bouddhisme, p. 19; Pillon, in L'Année Philosophique for 1868, p. 378-382; Müller, Chips, I. 196; Sanks. Lit., p. 520; Feer in Journal Asiatique for 1867 and 1870.