Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1898 edition. Excerpt: ... BUDDHISM. HAVING in the preceding essay sought to establish the position which the earliest form of the Indian religion properly occupies in the great process of the evolution of religion, the task presents itself of attempting to fix a similar historical position for a later stage of the same growth, namely for ancient Buddhism, --one of those structures in the history of religion, which, as a complete expression of deepest content, may well be classified with the classic types of human religion and human pursuit of salvation. The prevailing mood and, even more yet, the forms of mental expression in which the thought and life of the mendicant Buddhist monks revolved possess an almost contemporary double upon Greek soil: the creations of the West and the East corresponding closely to each other to an astonishing degree, in matters the most essential as well as in the most subordinate, even to the coining of rally-words about which the religious consciousness loves to concentrate, or to the drawing of similes which aim to make the grand direction of events in some sort palpable to the imagination, and which, while apparently of inferior import, often really belong to' the most powerful factors of religion. It is plainly no mere accident that a harmony between the ideas of two people, so widely separated both in space and national characteristics, should be so much more strongly and variously accentuated, just at the period of evolution of which we are here speaking, than it was before that time. The mythbuilding imagination which holds sway during the earlier periods, proceeds without aim or method upon its course. It receives its impulse from chance; accident combines in it capriciously materials widely divergent in character; as if at..