But I will not attempt to explain the ideal pantheism which Brahmanical philosophers substituted for the Nature-worship taught in the earlier Vedas.  This proved too abstract for the people; and the Brahmans, in the true spirit of modern Jesuitism, wishing to accommodate their religion to the people,—­who were in bondage to their tyranny, and who have ever been inclined to sensuous worship,—­multiplied their sacrifices and sacerdotal rites, and even permitted a complicated polytheism.  Gradually piety was divorced from morality.  Siva and Vishnu became worshipped, as well as Brahma and a host of other gods unknown to the earlier Vedas.

In the sixth century before Christ, the corruption of society had become so flagrant under the teachings and government of the Brahmans, that a reform was imperatively needed.  “The pride of race had put an impassable barrier between the Aryan-Hindus and the conquered aborigines, while the pride of both had built up an equally impassable barrier between the different classes among the Aryan people themselves.”  The old childlike joy in life, so manifest in the Vedas, had died away.  A funereal gloom hung over the land; and the gloomiest people of all were the Brahmans themselves, devoted to a complicated ritual of ceremonial observances, to needless and cruel sacrifices, and a repulsive theology.  The worship of Nature had degenerated into the worship of impure divinities.  The priests were inflated with a puerile but sincere belief in their own divinity, and inculcated a sense of duty which was nothing else than a degrading slavery to their own caste.

Under these circumstances Buddhism arose as a protest against Brahmanism.  But it was rather an ethical than a religious movement; it was an attempt to remove misery from the world, and to elevate ordinary life by a reform of morals.  It was effected by a prince who goes by the name of Buddha,—­the “Enlightened,”—­who was supposed by his later followers to be an incarnation of Deity, miraculously conceived, and sent into the world to save men.  He was nearly contemporary with Confucius, although the Buddhistic doctrines were not introduced into China until about two hundred years before the Christian era.  He is supposed to have belonged to a warlike tribe called Sakyas, of great reputed virtue, engaged in agricultural pursuits, who had entered northern India and made a permanent settlement several hundred years before.  The name by which the reformer is generally known is Gautama, borrowed by the Sakyas after their settlement in India from one of the ancient Vedic bard-families.  The foundation of our knowledge of Sakya Buddha is from a Life of him by Asvaghosha, in the first century of our era; and this life is again founded on a legendary history, not framed after any Indian model, but worked out among the nations in the north of India.