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hundred transmigrations; second, of his earthly life before attaining Buddhaship; third, of his ministry after he had become "enlightened." It is the legend that represents him as a saviour incarnated to bring blessings to men. It is the legend that describes his miraculous birth, entering his mother's side as a white elephant. It is the legend that tells us of his child miracles. It is the legend that says, when seated under the Bo-tree, Satan tempted him, surrounded with a phalanx eleven miles deep. It is the legend which says Satan's ashes and fire and smoke and rocks and mountains became but zephyrs and fragrant flowers on his neck. It is the legends which contain those myths which present correspondencies with the events in the life of Christ, like the angelic hosts as heralds ; Simeon the aged blessing his birth and Herod seeking to destroy the young child; the presentation at the temple; the dispute with the doctors; his baptism, transfiguration, temptation and translation. But it is incomplete and unsatisfactory logic to conclude that necessarily there must have been some special personification which these legends represent. It may be true that the legends must be accounted for, but it is not necessarily true and certainly not proven that they imply an historic personage. It would be a troublesome, if not severe logic, that would make us conclude that every famous legend of the Asiatic world must necessarily have had a personification in history. Dr. Ellinwood, who, we take it, is the author of the article in the new "Cyclopædia of Missions," of Funk & Wagnalls, on Buddhism, sums up the matter perhaps as nearly as can be done, when he says: "It has virtually been settled by the consensus of the best scholars that those accounts which are the oldest, which are authorized by the earliest councils, which have the concurrent testimony of both the Northern and the Southern literatures, and which are credible in themselves, shall be accepted as the probable history of Gautama." This, then, is the nearest liberal conclusion that we can reach of the value of the history, and this is admitted to be only "probable.' probable." Nobody will claim that we have here exact history. If, however, we give the historic side the benefit of the doubt, as to the personality of Gautama Buddha, what then? Still another question arises, What do we owe to him? How far is he to be credited with being the author of the system or rather the unsystematic teaching which is known as Buddhism? other words,

IS GAUTAMA BUDDHA THE ORIGINATOR OF BUDDHISM?

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Dr. Oldenberg says: "If it was usual formerly to describe Buddha as the religious re-creator of India, as the one great champion in the struggle for his time; henceforth as research advances we shall find ourselves more and more distinctly compelled to regard him as simply one of the many contemporary heads of ascetic unions-one concerning whom it is not and cannot be in any way shown that he exceeded his rivals in profundity of

thought or force of will, even in any approach to the same proportion in which, perhaps by nothing but a change of purely accidental circumstances, he has come to transcend them in actual renown. From the multitudinous saviours of the world who were traversing India in every direction about the year 500 B. C., a second figure has already issued into distinct recognition." He refers to the founder of the Jain sect of Buddhists.

Gautama was not the only
Buddhas. These possible

It must be always borne in mind that Buddha. Other beings will also become Buddhas, called Bodisat, are numberless. Buddhas Buddhas appear after regularly recurring intervals in a series that has no beginning or end. The Singhalese suppose all trace of the preceding Buddhas has been lost, except as presented in Gautama Buddha's teachings.

It is thought by many Orientalists that Gautama was not the originator of Buddhism, that he only revived the system of the more ancient sages. On the great bell in Rangoun the inscription says there are three divine relics of three deities enshrined there, who were the immediate predecessors of Gautama Buddha. The dates of these three predecessors of Gautama have been celebrated as 3101 B. C., 2099 B.C., and 1014 B. C. respectively. It is difficult, therefore, supposing Gautama Buddha to be an historic person, to determine how much of what is peculiarly Buddhistic is to be attributed to him.

WHAT GAVE GAUTAMA POPULARITY?

It is not so difficult to see what it is, in the whole concept of Gautama Buddha's story as popularly related, that gave him pre-eminence, or that gave, if you please, to the myth its popularity.

Kuenen says that it was his masterly attempt to bring within the reach of those who have not bid farewell to social life, who cannot in the nature of the case become ascetics, such measure of salvation as is possible for them—it is this which is distinctly the work of Gautama.

Spence Hardy very aptly puts the most distinctive things about Gautama when he writes: "A great part of the respect paid to Gautama Buddha arises from the supposition that he voluntarily endured throughout myriads of ages, and in numberless births, the most severe deprivations and afflictions, that he might thereby gain the power to free sentient beings from the misery to which they were exposed under every possible form of existence.

"It is thought that myriads of ages previous to the reception of the Buddhaship, he might have become a Rahat (entered into Nirvana), and therefore ceased to exist; but that of his own free will he forewent the privilege and threw himself into the stream of successive existence for the benefit of the three worlds."

This is what is meant by Gautama becoming the saviour of men.

THE PRACTICAL VALUE TO BUDDHISTS OF GAUTAMA'S ACT.

Another question then presses on our thought-What, from the standpoint of the Buddhists themselves, is the practical output of this noble and self-sacrificing act of Gautama? It would seem that from the veneration accorded him, from the great value attributed to his renunciation of his hard-won privilege to enter Nirvana, that there ought to be some corresponding result to the masses of men for whom he made the sacrifice; but we are at a loss to locate it. The hope of Nirvana is not, after all, the hope of Buddhist communities. Only a few of the holiest and most austere after uncounted centuries of uncounted forms of existence have ever attained to it. Less than a dozen followers of Gautama have in twenty-five centuries ever reached Nirvana. Rhys Davids says: "Though laymen could attain Nirvana, we are told of only one or two instances of their having done so, and though it was more possible for members of the Buddhist Order of Mendicants to do so, we hear after the time of Gautama of only one or two who did so." Oldenberg says that Gautama himself grew very reticent in later life about Nirvana, and that he became himself an agnostic. Thus practically the entrance into Nirvana is something the ordinary Buddhist never concerns himself about. It is out of his range, and he takes no interest in the question whether Nirvana is absorption, extinction, or mere existence, without any qualities whatever. It is not for him, why should he bother himself about it? The more devout may hope to ascend to some one of the Buddhist heavens. Others may aspire to positions of influence after this life; but Nirvana is something they never trouble themselves about. We are told the Siamese rarely if ever mention it. Virtue will be rewarded by going to Savan (heaven), till his stock of merit is exhausted, and then he must, like everybody and everything else, take his chances as to what will follow in the endless series of being, dependent on merit and demerit again. He does, in localities, endeavor to find relief from the theory of absolute and unalterable consequence, as in China, where he has invented a Chinese Goddess of Mercy, a Chinese Virgin Mary, whose highest merit is that, like Buddha, she turned back from the door of Nirvana to hear the cries, and succor from conditions of misery, the human family. It is this idea which made the historical or mythical Gautama the reputed founder of Buddhism. It is this that made Buddhism, as contrasted with Brahmanism, a missionary religion, a thing Brahmanism could never become; but, after all, how has it helped the Buddhist to get quit of the, to him, bane of all creation, the ceaseless round of existence, The Wheel? Gautama eliminates the idea of a personal God. There is simply no room for a Supreme Deity. Self-acting, immutable, eternal Law is made to account for the origin and continuance of all things. There is no personality to the human being. Soul is a metaphysical fiction in the Buddhist faith. Gautama Buddha did not mend the matter. He was no saviour from Buddhist metaphysics.

The same dread of all Buddhist being remains. Man is bound in the endless chain of ceaseless and relentless being. Transmigration according to merit antedates Gautama Buddha, and remains unmodified by him.

There is here no Supreme Being weighing deserts, dispensing, directing with reference to either justice or mercy. It is simply the eternal wheel of change, the unchecked flow of action and irresistible result. No power in the sky, no power in the sea, no power on the earth, no power under the earth, may ungear an atom of consequence from an atom of action. The action itself is resistless, the result is resistless; and everything revolves and ensues and ensues and revolves in an endless, irreversible, irresistible chain of consequence. This blind, unfeeling, unthinking, eternal Law, or Order, or Wheel, of revolving change grinds and crashes right on, now gentle as zephyrs, now terrific as collision of spheres; now delicate as a bird's eye, now cyclonic and all-enveloping as cosmic periods are, and flame of demi-gods. Law, Eternal Law, Change that dates no beginning hour in the enveloping eternities of the Past, and knows no parenthesis in the onsweep of the infinitely little or the infinitely lofty-a mighty swinging course of eternal consequences that cannot be lifted off their hinges through unending and uncounted and inconceivable periods of existence. That is all that is left to contemplate, if courage can be found equal to contemplate it.

There is no Law-Maker, hence no one to control law, no one to intercept, interrupt, check or sustain law. Hence there is no Creator, no Almighty One to condemn or to forgive, and hence no benign Providence to save from the effect of one's folly or mistakes; and hence no great Benefactor to whom to render thanksgiving, nor to repose in, nor to pray to, nor to praise, nor to worship. Here is no explanation of the beginning of things, no dealing with the riddle of creation. Buddha himself made no attempt to say how existence began. Buddhism can as a consequence know no prayer. "Pray not, the darkness will not brighten. Ask naught, for the silence it cannot speak. Vex not your mournful minds with pious pains. Ah! brothers, sisters, seck naught from the helpless gods by gift or hymn, nor bribe with blood, nor feed with fruit. Within yourselves deliverance must be sought; hence there is no sacrifice." Arnold well renders the thought.

"Each man's life

The outcome of his former living is.
The angels in the heaven's gladness reap
Fruits of the holy past.

"" 'Devils in the under world wear out
Deeds that were wicked in an age gone by.
It knows not wrath nor pardon, after truth

Its measure makes, its faultless balance weighs."

From all this dire, dread fate, Gautama did not save his people. They are bound down with it so far as they accept Buddhism as it is presented

in the literature, whether of philosophy or legend. It is one long, helpless, hopeless bondage, driving men to despondency or paralyzing all moral purpose, save as they rise above it or are indifferent to it. That is what ails

Buddhism!

IV.—HAVE THE MONUMENTS AND PAPYRI ANYTHING TO SAY OF THE HEBREWS AND THE EXODUS ?

EGYPTOLOGY, No. IX.

BY REV. CAMDEN M. COBERN, PH.D., ANN ARBOR, MICH.

"A foolish atheist, whom I lately found,
Alleged philosophy in his defence.

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Said he, 'The arguments I use are sound.'
Just so,' said I; 'all sound, and little sense.
-Beha-ed-din, Zoheir of Egypt.

I. No biography of Moses or history of the Exodus can be gathered from the Egyptian records.

It is not surprising that in the early, uncritical days of hieroglyphic knowledge, after Champollion had recognized the Sallier and Anastasi papyri as being of the times of Moses, that a few hasty and ardent spirits should have "taken by assault the Egyptian language," and by an imaginative and arbitrary process of interpretation have translated these records to suit themselves. In 1855 the most important of these attempts was made, and its author congratulated his readers upon this rare find of "Egyptian newspapers" of the Mosaic age, which gave "a true, original and vivid picture of many of the actors of the Exodus." "After three thousand years we have fallen upon an Egyptian song alluding concisely but accurately to the slavery, rebellion, and exodus of the Jews, and to the ascent of Mount Sinai by Moses." In one papyrus he read the names of many Bible characters. There was Moses and Phineas; there was Balaam and Balak; and there was Jannes, followed by a blank which, of course, contained Jambres, the gap being just about long enough for that !*

For three years not a word repudiating this discovery seems to have been uttered by the few savants capable of testing a hieroglyphic translation, but about that time appeared a noisy article in a French journal, which ventured a new translation of these papyri, in which appeared prominently the plagues of Egypt and the destruction of Pharaoh in the Red Sea; and all this was presented as the result of the lessons of M. Ch. Lenormant, of the College of France. Owing to the prominent position and acknowledged learning of M. Lenormant this called forth an immediate answer from M. Chabas, who declared the "total inanity" of the system of interpretation to which was due these startling discoveries. Notwithstanding this exposure from one fully qualified to speak, some scholars

* "The Exodus Papyri," Rev. D. I. Heath, London, 1855.

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