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EASTERN MONACHISM.

I. GOTAMA BUDHA.

ABOUT two thousand years before the thunders of Wycliffe were rolled against the mendicant orders of the west, Gótama Budha commenced his career as a mendicant in the east, and established a religious system that has exercised a mightier influence upon the world than the doctrines of any other uninspired teacher, in any age or country. The incidents of his life are to be found in the sacred books of the Budhists, which are called in Páli, the language in which they are written, Pitakattayan, from pitakan, a basket or chest, and tayo, three, the text being divided into three great classes. The instructions contained in the first class, called Winaya, were addressed to the priests; those in the second class, Sútra, to the laity; and those in the third class, Abhidharmma, to the déwas and brahmas of the celestial worlds. There is a commentary, called the Atthakatha, which until recently was regarded as of equal authority with the text. The text was orally preserved until the reign of the Singhalese monarch Wattagamani, who reigned from B. c. 104 to B. c. 76, when it was committed to writing in the island of Ceylon. The commentary was written by Budhagósha, at the ancient city of Anuradhapura, in Ceylon, A. D. 420. In this interval there was ample space for the invention of the absurd legends that are inserted therein relative to Budha and his immediate disciples, as we may learn from the similar stories that were invented relative to the western saints, in a period less extended.

The father of Gótama Budha, Sudhódana, reigned at Kapilawastu, on the borders of Nepaul; and in a garden near that city the future sage was born, B. c. 624. At the moment of his birth he stepped

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the ground, and after looking around towards the four quarters, the four half-quarters, above, and below, without seeing any one in any of these ten directions who was equal to himself, he exclaimed, "Aggo hamasmi lókassa; jettho hamasmi lókassa; settho hamasmi lókassa; ayamantimájáti; natthidáni punabbhawo; I am the most exalted in the world; I am chief in the world; I am the most excellent in the world; this is my last birth; hereafter there is to me no other existence." Upon his person were certain signs that enabled the soothsayers to foretell that he would become a recluse, preparatory to his reception of the supreme Budhaship. Five days after his birth he received the name of Sidhártta, but he is more commonly known by the name of Sákya or Gótama, both of which are patronymics. When five months old he sat in the air, without any support, at a ploughing festival. When sixteen years of age he was married to Yasodhará, daughter of Suprabudha, who reigned at Kóli. The father of the predicted Budha having heard that it would be by the sight of four signs-decrepitude, sickness, a dead body, and a recluse he would be induced to abandon the world, commanded that these objects should be kept away from the places to which he usually resorted; but these precautions were all in vain. One day, when proceeding to a garden at some distance from the palace, he saw an old man, whose trembling limbs were supported by a staff. Attracted by the sight, he asked his charioteer if he himself should ever be similarly feeble, and when he was told it was the lot of all men, he returned to the palace disconsolate. Four months afterwards he saw a leper, presenting an appearance utterly loathsome. Again, after the elapse of a similar period he saw a dead body, green with corruption, with worms creeping out of the nine apertures.* And a year after the sight of the aged man he saw a recluse proceeding along the road in a manner that indicated the possession of an inward tranquillity; modest in his deportment, his whole appearance was strikingly decorous. Having

*The text is almost a literal parallelism to the words of the old ballad. "On looking up, on looking down,

She saw a dead man on the ground;
And from his nose, unto his chin,

The worms crawl'd out, the worms crawl'd in.

"Then she unto the parson said,
Shall I be so when I am dead,
Oh yes! oh yes! the parson said,
You will be so when you are dead."

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