CHAPTER IX.

THE BUDDHIST MORAL SYSTEM.

The Ten virtues and Ten vices--The cause of human stupidity is in the passions--The Five prohibitions--The Ten prohibitions--Klaproth's praise of Buddhism--But it is atheistic, and therefore this praise should be qualified--Kindness to animals based on the fiction of transmigration--Buddhism teaches compassion for suffering without inculcating obedience to divine law--Story of Shakyamuni--Sin not distinguished from misery--Buddhists teach that the moral sense is innate--They assign a moral nature to animals--The Six paths of the metempsychosis--Hindoo notions of heaven and hell--Countless ages of joy and suffering--Examples--Exemption from punishment gained by meritorious actions--Ten kings of future judgment--Fate or Karma--Buddhism depreciates heaven and the gods--Buddha not God, but a Saviour--Moral influence of the Paradise of the Western heaven--Figurative interpretation of this legend--The contemplative school identifies good and evil--No moral distinctions in the Nirvana--Buddhism has failed to produce high morality--The Confucianist condemnation of the Buddhists--Mr. P. Hordern's praise of Buddhism in Birmah--The Birmese intellectually inferior to the Chinese--Kindness to animals known to the Chinese before they received Buddhism--Buddha's reasons for not eating flesh.

THE books of primitive Buddhism exhibit a higher moral tone than is found in the larger works full of metaphysical abstractions, which succeeded them. The "Book of Forty-two Sections," translated in the first century, and belonging to the former class, speaks of Ten vices and Ten virtues as belonging to mankind. The vices are: three of the body--killing, stealing, and adultery; four of the lips--slandering, reviling, lying, and elegant words (uttered

with a vicious intention); three of the mind--jealousy, hatred, and "folly" (ch'i), the last of which includes not believing in "the Honoured Three" (Buddha, Dharma, Sanga), and holding erroneous opinions. The opposites of these are the Ten virtues.

In the same work Buddha says: "That which causes the stupidity and delusion of man is love and the desires." "Man having many faults, if he does not repent, but allows his heart to be at rest, sins will rush upon him like water to the sea. When vice has thus become more powerful it is still harder than before to abandon it. If a bad man becomes sensible of his faults, abandons them and acts virtuously, his sin will day by day diminish and be destroyed, till he obtains full enlightenment."