The Historians' History of the World 02

The facts which we have brought forward show conclusively that the wide gulf which was supposed, at a time when the first was known solely through books, to separate Buddhism from Brahmanism has never existed, and it is only the preconceived idea of this separation that has prevented the close bond that in reality unites them from being seen. One of the keenest European observers who has ever made his home in India, Hodgson, in citing certain Sivaic images which are to be seen in the Buddhist temples of India, goes to infinite pains to explain their presence. Not for an instant is it to be admitted, he says, that there could be fusion between cults as widely separated as heaven and earth. Yet Hodgson was a resident in Nepal and had only to cast his eyes about him to see, the point to which Brahmanic and Buddhist gods were intermingled in the temples of the land in which he lived. At this epoch the two religions were held to be so wholly distinct that it was impossible that the idea of their having the least thing in common should arise in any mind.

This instance, showing how a preconceived belief can blind to evidence, is the more curious inasmuch as there exists a work (on the extreme resemblance that prevails between many of the symbols of Buddhism and Sivaism) in which the author shows, by numerous examples, how frequently the Hindu writers and learned men themselves confound the Buddhist and Brahmanic images contained in the ancient temples; a confusion that is instantly made clear if one takes into account what we have said regarding the final merging into one of Buddhism and Brahmanism.

Disappearance of Buddhism in India

No one is ignorant of the fact that after having spread from India all over the rest of Asia, China, Russian Tatary, Burmah, etc., Buddhism, now the religion of three hundred million people, that is to say, of one-fifth of the world’s inhabitants, disappeared almost entirely towards the seventh or eighth century of our era from the country that gave it birth. It still subsists in India only upon the two extreme frontiers of that vast empire; Nepal in the north, and Ceylon in the south. Hindu books being absolutely silent on the subject of this disappearance, recourse has been had until now, in order to explain it, to the hypothesis of violent persecution. Admitting the tolerant character of the Hindus to be compatible with the idea of religious persecution, also granting that the effect of persecution is to destroy a religion instead of facilitating, as history teaches, its propagation, there would still be this difficulty: why, in a country divided as was formerly India into a hundred petty kingdoms, should all the reigning princes have suddenly decided at the same time to renounce the religion practised for centuries by their ancestors, and to force upon their people the adoption of another?

One begins to perceive the cause of the transformation of Buddhism as soon as one applies himself to the study of the monuments of India. After having studied attentively the greater part of the important monuments of India, one arrives at the conclusion that Buddhism disappeared simply because it gradually became reabsorbed into the religion from which it originally sprang.

This transformation was effected very slowly; but in a country which has no history, where are to be encountered periods of five or six centuries concerning which no knowledge has been handed down, there is no possible way of knitting together the loose ends of phases which appear to us alone and unconnected. In relation to these we are in the situation of the ancient geologists who, seeing the transformations that had taken place in the different layers of the earth and their inhabitants, and knowing nothing of the periods that had intervened between these transformations, supposed them all to be the result of violent cataclysms. A more advanced science would have shown them that it was by means of a series of insensible evolutions that these gigantic changes had been wrought.

The monuments of India relate to us plainly, when we examine with care the statues and bas-reliefs with which they are covered, the history of the transformation of Buddhism. They show us how the founder, who disdained all gods, finally became a god himself and figured, after having been absent from all, in every sanctuary. How, after having been the head of the crowd of Brahmanic divinities, he gradually became confounded with them until he finally passed out of sight entirely among their number.