Buddha and Buddhism

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THE Queen has in her possession a piece of ivory or little valued by her white-faced subjects, but immensely esteemed by the Buddhists of all lands.

"The possessor of the Tooth of Buddha will have the dominion of the World." Thus runs the ancient fiat, and a thoughtful French admiral told his compatriots the other day that this proud position had actually been attained by Britain. But he did not, of course, attribute it to the possession of the Tooth of Buddha, or indeed mention that object at all. He showed that the British fleet possessed an astounding power, which he strongly advised his compatriots not to undervalue.

But there is moral force as well as physical power; and the position of Her Gracious Majesty in the world is certainly unique. She holds in her dominions the most vital sections of all the great religions of the past. Her subjects pray to Christ, and Buddha, and Brahma, and Jehovah. They honour Zarathustra, and Moses, and Mahomet. Benares, the holy city of the greatest religious section of her subjects, is in her domains. The most intelligent of the Mussulman populations flourish peaceably in Delhi and the other Indian cities, where their creed of old attained its greatest triumphs. The Buddhists of Burmah and Ceylon are more enlightened than the Buddhists of other lands. No wonder that thoughtful minds begin to see in all this a possible mission for England, namely, to fuse the creeds of the world in one great crucible and eliminate the superstitious parts. Ancient creeds had much in common, and it is this common portion, the vital essence, that has been allowed to evaporate.

A short time ago a writer in the Revue des Deux Mondes announced that the Nineteenth Century had experienced two great surprises. The first was the discovery, due to Colebrooke and the earlier Sanskrit scholars, that the poems of early Greece were not altogether original. Jove and his Mount Olympus had been anticipated by Indra and his Mount Meru; the feats of Hercules had been matched by Bhima. Parnassus and Apollo and the Muses had prototypes in Mount Govudun, redolent with the music of Krishna and the Gopis; and that even the great hordes of gods and men, and their muster to avenge the rape of a pretty woman, had been previously made into a great epic on the banks of the Ganges.