an

connection can only be considered as Nirvâna, occasionally attainable before the close of the present life, eternal condition, which, in some rare cases, is entered upon and enjoyed before the termination of our present, transitory state.)

"Save in my religion," [Gautama continues,] "the twelve great disciples, who, being good themselves, rouse up the world, and deliver it from indifference, cannot be found. O Subhadra, I do not speak to you of things I have not experienced. Since I was twenty-nine years old till now, I have striven after pure and perfect wisdom, and, following the good path, have found Nirvâna.'

"A rule had been made that no follower of a rival system should be admitted to the Society without four months' probation. So deeply did the words or the impressive manner of the dying teacher work upon Subhadra that he asked to be admitted at once, and Gautama granted his request. Then turning to his disciples he said, 'When I have passed away, and am no longer with you, do not think that the Buddha has left you, and is not still in your midst." [" Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst."— Christ.] "You have my words, my explanations of the deep things of truth, the laws I have laid down for the Society; let them be your guide: the Buddha has not left you.' Soon afterwards he again spoke to them, urging them to reverence one another, and rebuked one of the disciples who spoke indiscriminately all that occurred to him. Towards the morning he asked whether any one had any doubts about the Buddha, the law, or the Society; if so, he would clear them up. No one answering, he said, ' Beloved mendicants, if you revere my memory, love all the disciples as you love me and my doctrines."" ["This last commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another."- Christ.] "Ananda expressed his surprise that among so many, none should doubt, and all be firmly attached to the law. But Buddha laid stress on the final perseverance of the saints, saying that even the least among the disciples who had entered the first path only, still had his heart fixed on the way to perfection, and constantly strove after the three higher paths. 'No doubt,' he said, 'can be found in the mind of a true disciple.' After another pause he said, Beloved, that which causes life causes also decay and death. Never forget this; let your minds be filled with this truth; I called you to make it known to you.' These were the last words Gautama spoke: shortly afterwards he became unconscious, and in that state passed away."

6

Doubtless referring to the twelve greatest of his own disciples, forming a select band, who always accompanied him.

His considerate care for his church, and anxiety even in the weakness of dissolution to save yet one more soul, are fraught with solemn pathos.

A sublime and affecting death-scene! It is at the same time no less instructive and touching to look back over the human story just closed, and mark this man, the greatest of his time, groping his way through the obscurity of mortal life, to its end, by the feeble rays of the little candle he had discovered, feeble, but very real and good light as far as its radiation extended, and throwing an honest and cheerful illumination over that limited circle,

and to note how grand and tranquil and perfect always is his contentment with this, the quantum of insight of the Truth allotted him.

ideas so Of the

The Booddha adopted without much change the Brahmanical ideas respecting the material universe, primitive as not to be worth recapitulation here. mode of origin of material nature he gave no distinct account it was under the unalterable rule of Law, the same Law which governed life. As regards men and their duties, right and wrong, merit and demerit, were most distinctly recognized and defined indeed, the condition of all living creatures was solely dependent on their obedience or disobedience to Law. The more perfect their obedience, the greater their advance in the scale of being and progress toward perfection; while the farther they went in departure from or breach of the Law, the lower they sunk toward hell. This progress and this retrogression, however, took place chiefly in the transfer of the individual life to another form of being. It seems incorrect to suppose, with some writers, that the individual life was not transferred in transmigration, that it was altogether a new life that was formed by the demerit of the old life. For the promised bliss of Nirvâna, that was the goal of individual effort and obedience, was an eternal release of the individual from the otherwise endless cir cuit of death and new birth, and was to be accomplished

by his passing into the repose of de-individualization. Now, this implies that unless the individual thus merged his individuality, he, personally, was not free from birth and death, in other words, was liable to be born again.

True, that the new life was said to owe its origin to the overbalancing of merit by demerit in the old; and this seems to imply that demerit had given rise, not to a "rebirth" or transference of the old, but to an entirely new life; yet the personal motive, of relief in Nirvâna from the perpetual recurrence of death and "new-birth" in Karma, (a motive continually appealed to,) would be wanting, if the old life were not, as physical life at least, transferred through Karma. The mere benevolent wish to prevent the birth of another unknown person being the result of one's own demerit, will not explain the longing for Nirvâna, nor furnish a sufficient motive for the self-denial of a life.

Booddha's Supreme Law, (the only authority in the universe,) although never asserted nor described by him as a person, nevertheless had certain personal traits ascribed to it. Merit and demerit toward the Law-in obedience or disobedience to it- necessarily imply the ideas of reward which is merited, or of approval or disapproval; of deserving, undeserving, a supreme approving, disapproving, merit-rewarding or punishing essence of some kind, outside the person who merits or does not merit the approval, reward or disapproval, even though the manifestation of this approval or disapproval be only through the operation of immutable Law. In other words, the ideas, merit and demerit, personify the Law. Toward a mere Law there can be neither merit nor demerit. There can be no merit or virtue in obeying a physical "law of nature," which it is impossible to disobey, — the law of gravity for instance: we cannot deserve or merit from such a law any reward, nor can displeasure or approval be attributed to it. Gautama's Law, therefore, was a Being. Right and wrong, merit and demerit, imply duty, something owed, which

can be refused, but which is expected to be paid. A debt implies not alone a debtor, but a creditor.

Again, as between man and man, the centre and “heart” of the Law was love, charity, benevolence, unselfishness. Just as merit and demerit, in obedience or disobedience to the Law, necessarily imply an instinctive, though unacknowledged, personification of the Law, in the performance of duty to whom the "merit" consisted, so the fact of the paramount obligation of the Law as between man and man, the highest duty and highest merit under it, being that of love and charity, — implies the quality of Love in this Law,- (or in whatever entity was behind and inspired it,) — to whom duty was owed and by whom merit was attributed, even though this entity were, in the Sage's teaching, named only as Law.

The life in individuals was constantly transferred at death to other forms, as has been said. There was, however, a grand sum of life, which never varied. On this point I will quote Mr. Davids:

“This world, like each of the others scattered through space, is periodically destroyed by water, fire or wind, but the sum of the demerits of the beings, (men, animals, angels, etc.,) who lived within it, produces each time a new world, which in its turn is fated to be destroyed. The number of these beings never varies save on those few occasions when one of them either in earth or heaven attains Nirvana; in every other case, as soon as an individual dies, another is produced under more or less material conditions, according as the sum of the former individual's demerits, minus the sum of its merits, was, at the time of its death, large or small."

As the basis of this theory is that of an unchanged sum of life, it should follow, (as before,) that Nirvâna cannot mean an extinction of the portion of life which belonged to the individual entering that state, (for such an extinction, repeated at never so long intervals, would alter and diminish, and finally altogether destroy the total sum of life and annihilate the universe,)- but rather a merging of the individual life in that grand total, the sum of the life of the universe, which, when all shall have entered

Nirvâna, remains forever, freed from the vicissitudes of births and deaths. And as the duties of man, benevolence, love, etc., are always, (in the Booddha's teaching,) towards other lives under the Law, it can hardly be doubted that, in his mind, the Supreme Law and this Universal Life or Sum of lives were closely connected, — the one, the expression of man's duty toward the other.

I can see no way of reconciling with his theory, the personal qualities implied to exist in the Law by the very idea of merit towards it or under it, but by supposing that Booddha herein, (unconsciously perhaps,) accepted the doctrine he had learned from the Upanishads, viz., that the universal life, while living in individuality or insulation in all beings, "existed also apart" as a supreme central Life and fountain of Law and life; that Nirvâna was re-union with it in this centralized or free condition, and that the great Law was at once the expression of its supreme will, the condition of its existence, and the rule of man's duty to it and to all other lives or forms of Life.

The idea of the grand sum of life never varying, certainly seems to imply that of the indestructibility of life, and of its apparent destruction being really only a change of location or sphere, (to a higher or lower one according to merit or demerit). But the highest achievement of merit was to attain an eternal freedom from this necessity of change of sphere, in the Nirvâna or changeless state which involved a cessation of individuality, and was a subsidence into the tranquillity of the universal Sea of Life. This mystery was illustrated in Booddhist writings by the figure of the dewdrop melting into the boundless. sun-illumined sea.

The gods of Brahmanism having been felt by Gautama to be failures as divinities, he nevertheless did not deny their existence, but as has been said before, placed them in the position of Devas, similar to the Jewish and Christian angels and archangels. He could not, consistently with this view of the Hindu gods as being no divinities,