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Priestcraft and Magic Art-Brahm, Maya, and Bodhi-The Eastern Pâramita and the Western Tradition-Jainism and Buddhism-The Sakas and Sakya-Muni-Records of Buddhistic Tradition.

Priestcraft and Magic Art.

BUDDHISTIC TRADITION is a comparatively late deposit of ancestorial wisdom, written or unwritten. It can be rendered probable, though it cannot be proved, that such deeper knowledge was confined to a select number of initiated, among whom the mysteries were transmitted from one generation to another. Such an organisation for the transmission of knowledge withheld from the people, presupposes firmly established priestly institutions and a secluded mode of life, regulated by severe customs. Of an ascetic system like this there is no trace among the East-Iranians, who were the representatives of Zoroastrian doctrines, a source from which Buddhism certainly has drawn. It is exceedingly strange, that although India is the country where such institutions and customs seem to have originated, yet that they were not established there at the indefinite time when the most ancient Indian records, the Veda, were composed in the Indus valley, and before the Aryan conquerors had established themselves on the Ganges. A comparison of the Veda with the book of Manu,

containing the sacred law of the Brahmans on the Ganges, marks a peculiar development among the Indians; and we arrive at a similar result by a comparison of the Zendavesta with the books and rites of the Magi or priests of the Medes in Mesopotamia, whereby a contrast is established between the Iranians of the East and those of the West.

These two hotbeds of priestcraft, cradles of hierarchical institutions and of asceticism in East and West, offer some important points of analogy, which render it at the outset not improbable that there was some kind of connection between the institutions on the banks of the Euphrates and Tigris, and those which prevailed in the valley of the Ganges. Both Indian communities, that on the Indus and that on the Ganges, worshipped Indra, as both the eastern and the western community of Iranians worshipped Ormuzd. Yet the Aryans on the Indus must have despised their brethren on the Ganges, as the East-Iranians certainly despised their brethren, the Magi or priests of the Medes, in the west of the Caspian. This was the country of wicked doubt; where the bodies of the dead, instead of being burnt in accordance with East-Iranian custom, were buried in the earth, thus desecrating it. Such separate development and antagonism is all the more significant, since the Medes were once all Aryans, and since they continued in the West to venerate the symbolism of the East-Iranians. Thus a system of dualism had sprung up, which in its popular form and interpretation militated against the monotheism of the Ormuzd religion, although the Magi recognised the same. The consideration of this parallel development among the Eastern Indians and among the Western Iranians is a necessary introduction to the history of the origin and propagation of Buddhism.

The highest development of the Brahmanic system is based on the diametrical contrast of body and soul, of

ASCETICISM OF BRAHMANS AND MAGI.

matter and spirit. Considering the body as impure by itself, Brahmanism was forced to set up, not only the demand of a continuous taming and subjecting of sensuality by the spirit, but to declare, in the last instance, the destruction of the body as the only true purity. From this theory, followed, practically, the injuring of the body by ascetic impossibilities. The Zendavesta does not know these premises. The Zendavesta likewise separates body and soul, the spiritual from the material world; also it is not wanting in abstraction, and those hosts of spirits who people heaven are, if taken by themselves, in part very deep-meaning conceptions of spiritual powers, although from the standpoint of a natural and poetical religious spirit they are pale allegories. But the Indian antagonism between the spiritual and the bodily world is unknown to the Zendavesta. The pure and holy spirits have created the world of the senses, not in order to entangle man in darkness and evil, but in order to give him life and prosperity. Here the evil is limited to only one side of this world of senses, to darkness, drought, desert, and death; whilst in India the evil spreads over the whole matter, and this bad side of nature has not emanated from the pure but from the impure spirits. Since, according to the Zendavesta, only a part of nature is separated as evil, man has not to put off his entire nature, but to rejoice in the good side of it, to strengthen the same in and around himself, and to observe a defensive, guarding, and fighting attitude against the evil side of nature only. Thus self-preservation, instead of self-destruction, is set up for man as his aim and end: thus practical and obtainable objects are held out to man; thus are given the conditions of a healthy and active human existence, which have led to other results, than those to which Indians have been led by the contemplation, the quietism, the monkish asceticism, and the relapses into sensuous excesses which are inseparably connected with the former.

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