. All is god, but God is left out of consideration. The gods
are even less than Buddhas. Humanity is glorified and the stress of all
teaching is upon this life. In a word: a sinless life, attainable by
man, through his own exertions in this world, above all the powers or
beings of the universe, is the essence of original Buddhism. Original
Nirvana meant death which ends all, extinction of existence.

Gautama's immediate purpose was to emancipate himself and his followers
from the fetters of Brahminism. He tried to leave the world of Hindu
philosophy behind him and to escape from it.

Did he succeed? Partially.

Buddha hoped also to rise above the superstitions of the common people,
but in this he was again only partially successful.[37] "The clouds
returned after the rain." The old dead gods of Brahminism came back
under new names and forms. The malarial exhalations of corrupt
Brahmanistic philosophy, continually poisoned the atmosphere which
Buddha's disciples breathed. Still worse, as his religion transmigrated
into other lands, it became itself a history of transformation, until
to-day no religion on earth seems to be such a kaleidoscopic
phantasmagoria. Polytheism is rampant over the greater part of the
Buddhist world to-day. In the larger portion of Chinese Asia, pantheism
dominates the mind. In modern Babism,--a mixture of Mohammedanism,
Christianity and Buddhism,--there are streaks of dualism. If Monotheism
has ever dawned on the Buddhist world, it has been in fitful pulses as
in auroral flashes, soon to leave darkness darker.

For us is this lesson: Buddhism, brought face to face with the problem
of the world's evil and possible improvement, evades it; begs the whole
question at the outset; prays: "Deliver us from existence. Save us from
life and give us as little as possible of it." Christianity faces the
problem and flinches not; orders advance all along the line of endeavor
and prays: "Deliver us from evil;" and is ever of good cheer, because
Captain and leader says: "I have overcome the world." Go, win it for me.
"I have come that they might have life, and that they might have it more
abundantly."

CHAPTER VII - RIY[=O]BU, OR MIXED BUDDHISM

"All things are nothing but mind."

"The doctrines of Buddhism have no fixed forms."

"There is nothing in things themselves that enables us to
distinguish in them either good or evil, right or wrong. It is
but man's fancy that weighs t