sics were now what
Buddhism represented. This religion was become, indeed, as much a
skeleton as was the Brahmanism of the sixth century. As the Brahmanic
belief had decomposed into spiritless rites, so Buddhism,
changed into dialectic and idolatry (for in lieu of a god the later
church worshipped Buddha), had lost now all hold upon the people. The
love of man, the spirit of Buddhism, was dead, and Buddhism crumbled
into the dust. Vital and energetic was the sectarian 'love of God'
alone (Hinduism), and this now became triumphant. Where Buddhism has
succeeded is not where the man-gods, objects of love and fear, have
entered; but where, without rivalry from more sympathetic beliefs, it
has itself evolved a system of idolatry and superstition; where all
that was scorned by the Master is regarded as holiest, and all that he
insisted upon as vital is disregarded.[64] One speaks of the millions
of Buddhists in the world as one speaks of the millions of Christians;
but while there are some Christians that have renounced the bigotry
and idolatry of the church, and hold to the truth as it is in the
words of Christ, there are still fewer Buddhists who know that their
Buddhism would have been rebuked scornfully by its founder.

The geographical growth of formal Buddhism is easily sketched. After
the first entrance into Kashmeer and Ceylon, in the third century
B.C., the progress of the cult, as it now may be called, was steadily
away from India proper. In the fifth century A.D., it was adopted in
Burmah,[65] and in the seventh in Siam. The Northern school kept in
general to the 'void' doctrine of N[=a]g[=a]rjuna, whose chief texts
are the Lotus and the Lalita Vistara, standard works of the Great
Vehicle.[66] In Tibet Lamaism is the last result of this hierarchical
state-church.[67] We have thought it much more important to give a
fuller account of early Buddhism, that of Buddha, than a full account
of a later growth in regions that, for the most part, are not Indic,
in the belief that the P[=a]li books of Ceylon give a truer picture of
the early church than do those of Kashmeer and Nep[=a]l, with their
Civaite and Brahmanic admixture. For in truth the Buddhism of China
and Tibet has no place in the history of Indic religions. It may have
been introduced by Hindu missionaries, but it has been re-made to suit
a foreign people. This does not apply, of course, to the canonical
books, the Great Vehicle, of the North, which is essentia