then it
is that men who are living for religion seek for such aid as they can
give each other, and find it in an order and a discipline. The rules
of the Buddhist Samgha or order are extant, and so are the rules of
the contemporary Jainist fraternity. The Samgha resembled the
Franciscan more than the other great Christian orders. The Bhikku on
joining it abandoned his family and property, assumed the yellow robe
and other scanty properties of the character, and lived thenceforth
by begging, and in strict subjection to the rules, in which every
detail of his food, his clothing, his residence, and his daily walk
and conversation, were laid down. The two great objects of the
society were mutual help in the religious life and the preaching of
the doctrine. Under the first head come the frequent meetings of
monks and the confessions they make to each other according to a
fixed form. There is no vow of obedience; the monk obeys the law, not
the human authority. In preaching they are to go one by one, and they
are to preach to all. To all who would hear it was the gate open to
this salvation. Here the Buddhist neglect of caste comes in. Buddhism
makes no general or formal declaration of the equality of all men,
nor is there any attack on the Brahman caste or any exaltation of the
lower castes. The order drew its recruits at first from the ranks of
the Brahmans. But the impelling motive of the new religion was
compassion, and genuine compassion is not to be restrained in
artificial limits. The salvation preached was fitted for all men. The
disease to be cured was one from which all suffer, and the cure was
one which all could at least begin to lay hold of. Thus Buddhism was
fitted to break through the barriers of caste, and to gather into one
religious community men of all castes alike. In the community, it was
held, these distinctions disappeared. Not birth but conduct there
made the true Brahman. The universalist tendency of the religion also
fitted it to spread to other lands. It was not limited by anything in
its teaching to the soil of India, nor to the territory of any
particular set of gods. So wide indeed is its toleration, that a man
may embrace it without giving up the faith in which he lived before.
One can add it without incongruity to one's former beliefs and
practices. The believer in Shang-ti can be a Buddhist as well as the
believer in Brahma.[6] The absence of any hierarchy or centralised
organisation enabled i