temple, has its
multitude of ignorant worshippers, who doubt not that three several
divinities are the objects of their adoration and their prayer.

Such, then, as would appear, was the origin of Buddhism. Strictly
speaking, and apart from its later developments, Buddhism is a religion
which knows no God, which attaches no value to prayer, which has no place
for a priesthood. Nowhere, perhaps, is its agnosticism more conspicuous
than in the five main prohibitions, which are addressed alike to clergy
and laity. The _first_ of these forbids the taking of life,--human life
chiefly, but other life as well; the _second_ is against theft, whether by
force or fraud; the _third_ is against falsehood; the _fourth_ forbids
impurity, in act, word, or thought; the _fifth_ requires abstinence from
all intoxicants. The whole idea of _GOD_, it will be noticed, is entirely
absent from the Buddhist Commandments. Infinitely removed above that other
agnosticism, which cries, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,"
Buddhism starts with the idea of the entire abnegation of self. But a
self-denial that is undertaken, not for God, and in God for man, but
merely to secure one's own peace and well-being--what is this but
selfishness after all? Enjoining a rule of life that is essentially
negative--the natural product of that blank despair of the world and of
human nature which led to the Great Renunciation--Buddhism, as a religious
system, has yielded but scanty fruits of positive holiness, of active
benevolence. And yet,--wholly inadequate as such a system as this, even at
its purest and best, must be to meet the needs of humanity,--false and even
debased as are sometimes its teachings,--the one great message that
Buddhism proclaims is a message of undeniable, if most imperfect, truth:
the truth that would have man cultivate self-reliance, and attain to
self-deliverance by means of self-control. "Work out your own salvation"
is the injunction of Christianity. "By one's self," taught Sakya-muni,
"the evil is one; by one's self must come remedy and release." So far the
two systems are at one; the difference between them lies in the fact that
the one places in our hands those supernatural weapons which alone make
real victory possible, and that these the other knows not how to supply.

Hitherto, we have made no reference to the relation of Buddhism to
Brahmanism. And yet we can no more hope to understand the work of
Sakya-muni, without obs