Buddhism: its historical, theoretical and popular aspects
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| Buddhism |
Those who wish to make themselves further acquainted with this important religion may refer to the author's Handbook for the Student of Chinese Buddhism; London, Triibner & Co., 1870,' to which more painstaking work the present pamphlet* may serve as a general introduction.
It is with considerable hesitation, that I set out on this inquiry into the subject of Buddhism. But the reason for this hesitation is not that I, after having given years of study to this particular religion, failed to make myself familiar with its general characteristics and minute details.
It is the magnitude and importance of the subject that appals me and in view of which I naturally feel distrustful of my own power to deal with that subject in a satisfactory and yet attractive manner. Buddhism, I repeat, is a system of vast magnitude, for it combines the earliest gropings after science throughout those various branches of knowledge that our Western nations have long been accustomed to dividing for separate study.
It embodies in one living structure grand and peculiar views of physical science, refined and subtle theorems on abstract metaphysics, an edifice of fanciful mysticism, a most elaborate and far-reaching system of Lecture the First. practical morality, and finally a church organisation as broad in its principles and as finely wrought in its most intricate network as any in the world.
The magnitude of the subject, however, is but equalled by its importance. A system which takes its roots in the oldest code-book of Asiatic nations, in the Veda, a theory which extracted and remodelled all the best ideas that were ever laid hold of by ancient Brahmanism, a religion which has not only managed to subsist for more than two thousand years but which has succeeded to draw within the meshes of its own peculiar church-organization and to bring more or less under the influence of its own peculiar tenets several hundred millions of people, nearly one-third of the human race, — such a system, such a religion ought to have importance enough in our eyes to deserve something more than passing or passive attention.
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