sions between them; nor do
we know that the armed force of the State played any decisive part in
these spiritual revolutions.

I do not maintain that Buddhism has owed nothing to State influence.
It represents certain doctrines of the ancient Indian theosophy,
incarnate, as one might say, in the figure of a spiritual Master, the
Indian prince, Sakya Gautama, who was the type and example of ascetic
quietism; it embodies the idea of salvation, or emancipation
attainable by man's own efforts, without aid from priests or
divinities. Buddhism is the earliest, by many centuries, of the faiths
that claim descent from a personal founder. It emerges into authentic
history with the empire of Asoka, who ruled over the greater part of
India some 250 years before Christ, and its propagation over his realm
and the countries adjacent is undoubtedly due to the influence,
example, and authority of that devout monarch. According to Mr.
Vincent Smith, from whose valuable work on the Early History of India
I take the description of Asoka's religious policy, the king,
renouncing after one necessary war all further military conquest, made
it the business of his life to employ his autocratic power in
directing the preaching and teaching of the Law of Piety, which he had
learnt from his Buddhist priesthood. All his high officers were
commanded to instruct the people in the way of salvation; he sent
missions to foreign countries; he issued edicts promulgating ethical
doctrines, and the rules of a devout life; he made pilgrimages to the
sacred places; and finally he assumed the yellow robe of a Buddhist
monk. Asoka elevated, so Mr. Smith has said, a sect of Hinduism to the
rank of a world-religion. Nevertheless, I think it may be affirmed
that the emperor consistently refrained from the forcible conversion
of his subjects, and indeed the use of compulsion would have
apparently been a breach of his own edicts, which insist on the
principle of toleration, and declare the propagation of the Law of
Piety to be his sole object. Asoka made no attempt to persecute
Brahmanism; and it seems clear that the extraordinary success of
Buddhism in India cannot be attributed to war or to conquest. To
imperial influence and example much must be ascribed, yet I think
Buddhism owed much more to its spiritual potency, to its superior
faculty of transmuting and assimilating, instead of abolishing, the
elementary instincts and worships, endowing them with a higher