He did not profess to teach a new doctrine. What he taught was the "Way of the Buddhas." He recognized that there had been Buddhas before him, as there would be Buddhas after him. He was thus enabled freely to adopt many things that seemed good in systems other than his own, and flexibility has always been a mark of his religion. To us it will seem easy to conjecture the quarter from which he got his idea of a weekly sabbath, and the fact that the Order of Monks kept their sabbath days for many centuries after the Nirvana will make it easier for us to recognize and admit the doctrine held by a large section of northern Buddhists, that Buddha also taught, personally and during his earthly life, the salvation worked out for many by another Buddha, who is Boundless in Life, Light, and Compassion, and whom Japan knows as Amitabha.

S'akyamuni was no atheist. He did indeed teach that the enlightened Buddha was higher than the gods of the Brahman pantheon, higher than Indra, Varuna, Agni, Emma-San or Kompira Sama, who now fill subordinate places in Buddhist temples. These gods were creatures of fancy, subject, like Venus, Juno, Neptune, to the Law of Change, and liable to that extinction which has befallen the gods of Assyria and Babylon, of Egypt, Greece, and ancient Rome. From the denial of such gods to the denial of all gods is a very long step, and I think it may be shown that S'akyamuni never took it. Rather I would say, and this I hope to make clear as I proceed, that wherever S'akyamuni's own influence reached, it served to give men higher and truer ideas of the Divine Nature, and that his teachings were thus intended to prepare the way for the acceptance of the highest of all truths.

Footnotes

^5:1 Cf., in Japanese, "Buddha no Juseiron" (by Maeda); in English, "Buddhism in Translation" (Warren), "Gospel of Buddha" (Paul Carus); and in German, "Die Reden des Gotama Buddhas" (Neumann). The first of these is the most useful for the purposes of this book, because it has been compiled from a frankly Mahayanistic point of view.

^5:2 The importance of the sixth century B.C., which inaugurated so many movements of a religious and philosophical nature, it is hard to overestimate.

^5:3 Behar is said to derive its name from Vihara, a Buddhist monastery. It was one of the last, as it was also one of the first, strongholds of Buddhism in India.

^6:1 In Athens we find, e.g., the population of the autochthons divided into four classes corresponding to the four castes of India. Cf. Grote's "Hist. of Greece," chap. x. For the Aryan races, see Hunter, "Brief History of the Indian people," chap. iv. pp. 52-73.