The following extract from a Burmese book (quoted by Edmunds and Anesaki, op. cit., p. 5) deserves a thought:--

"In the time of the king named Nago the Robber, when the whole of Ceylon was vexed by the fear of the bad monks, the monks who kept up the Tripitaka went to India (compare No. 6 of Kas'yapa's dreams). Those monks who did not go thither, but stayed at home, being vexed by fear of famine, tightened their waistbands, encased their bodies in sand, and kept up the Tripitaka. ... When the fear of bad monks was appeased, the monks came back from India, and, together with the monks who had stayed in Ceylon, they reconciled the Tripitaka with the recension of the Great Minster (Mahasanghika), and when the two were made harmonious, they established them. Then when they were established, they kept them up in Ceylon only."

^91:1 Edmunds and Anesaki, p. 4. The date coincides with the dawn of the new era in the religious history of the world.

^91:2 This is the chronological theory adopted by Japanese Buddhism.

^92:1 I quote from the "Dialogue on Wonders and Marvels," given by Edmunds and Anesaki, pp. 54-60.

^92:2 The Tushita Heaven, one of the lower heavens in the Buddhist cosmology, is one in which beings with form can appear. The Highest Heaven is beyond form, and consequently beyond thought.

^94:1 See my "Shinran and His Work" (Tokyo, 1910), p. 47.

A good instance of the moral bankruptcy of the Hinayana at this period will be found in the "Katha Vatthu," translated by Rhys Davids in J.R.A.S, 1892. Also in the Jataka stories (published in English by the Cambridge University Press). Aesop esteemed these rightly in making them the basis of many of his fables, and they have left their traces in much of the folklore of many peoples in Asia and Europe. But the religion which produced them must first have lost a large part of its moral vigour. They do not speak the language of men who are terribly in earnest about some teaching of faith. One cannot imagine Tertullian or Augustine gravely telling a Jataka story. The "Katha Vatthu" contains a discussion, from the standpoints of the various Hinayana sects, of certain questions concerning Buddhist philosophy, ethics, and discipline. On very few of these questions were the answers given unanimously in the same sense. Here are some of the questions--

"Is there, in the truest and highest sense, a soul?" "No." [To this question two sects gave an affirmative answer. One of these sects must have been that of the Sarvastivadins, for the existence of the soul was one of their tenets.]

"Does the universe exist?" "No; there is nothing that is not transient." [But here again the Sarvastivadins affirmed the real existence of the universe.]