ing but
not for Bhikshus. The practice is recognized and commended in the
Lotus, chap. XXII, which however is a later addition to the original
work.]

[Footnote 260: I-Ching, transl. Takakusu, pp. 153-4 somewhat abridged.
I-Ching (pp. 156-7) speaks of Matricheta as the principal hymn writer
and does not identify him with Asvaghosha.]

[Footnote 261: I believe the golden image in the Arakan Pagoda at
Mandalay is still washed with a ceremonial resembling that described
by I-Ching.]

[Footnote 262: I-Ching says that monasteries commonly had a statue of
Mahakala as a guardian deity.]

[Footnote 263: By the Gupta king, Narasinha Gupta Baladitya. Much
information about Nalanda will be found in Satis Chandra
Vidyabhusana's _Mediaeval School of Indian Logic_, pp. 145-147. Hsuean
Chuang (_Life_, transl. Beal, p. 111) says that it was built 700 years
before his time, that is, in the first century B.C. He dwells on the
beauty of the buildings, ponds and flowers.]

CHAPTER XXIV

DECADENCE OF BUDDHISM IN INDIA

The theme of this chapter is sad for it is the decadence, degradation
and ultimate disappearance of Buddhism in India. The other great
religions offer no precise parallel to this phenomenon but they also
do not offer a parallel to the circumstances of Buddhism at the time
when it flourished in its native land. Mohammedanism has been able to
maintain itself in comparative isolation: up to the present day
Moslims and Christians share the same cities rather than the same
thoughts, especially when (as often) they belong to different races.
European Christianity after a few centuries of existence had to
contend with no rival of approximately equal strength, for the
struggle with Mohammedanism was chiefly military and hardly concerned
the merits of the faiths. But Buddhism never had a similarly paramount
and unchallenged position. It never attempted to extirpate its rivals.
It coexisted with a mass of popular superstition which it only gently
reprobated and with a powerful hereditary priesthood, both
intellectual and pliant, tenacious of their own ideas and yet ready to
countenance almost any other ideas as the price of ruling. Neither
Islam nor Christianity had such an adversary, and both of them and
even Judaism resemble Buddhism in having won greater success outside
their native lands than in them. Jerusalem is not an altogether
satisfactory spectacle to either Christians or Jews.[264]

Still all this does no