Buddhism has a twofold aspect,—­practical and speculative.  In its most definite form it was a moral and philanthropic movement,—­the reaction against Brahmanism, which had no humanity, and which was as repulsive and oppressive as Roman Catholicism was when loaded down with ritualism and sacerdotal rites, when Europe was governed by priests, when churches were damp, gloomy crypts, before the tall cathedrals arose in their artistic beauty.

From a religious and philosophical point of view, Buddhism at first did not materially differ from Brahmanism.  The same dreamy pietism, the same belief in the transmigration of souls, the same pantheistic ideas of God and Nature, the same desire for rest and final absorption in the divine essence characterized both.  In both there was a certain principle of faith, which was a feeling of reverence rather than the recognition of the unity and personality and providence of God.  The prayer of the Buddhist was a yearning for deliverance from sorrow, a hope of final rest; but this was not to be attained until desires and passions were utterly suppressed in the soul, which could be effected only by prayer, devout meditations, and a rigorous self-discipline.  In order to be purified and fitted for Nirvana the soul, it was supposed, must pass through successive stages of existence in mortal forms, without conscious recollection,—­innumerable births and deaths, with sorrow and disease.  And the final state of supreme blessedness, the ending of the long and weary transmigration, would be attained only with the extinction of all desires, even the instinctive desire for existence.

Buddha had no definite ideas of the deity, and the worship of a personal God is nowhere to be found in his teachings, which exposed him to the charge of atheism.  He even supposed that gods were subject to death, and must return to other forms of life before they obtained final rest in Nirvana.  Nirvana means that state which admits of neither birth nor death, where there is no sorrow or disease,—­an impassive state of existence, absorption in the Spirit of the Universe.  In the Buddhist catechism Nirvana is defined as the “total cessation of changes; a perfect rest; the absence of desire, illusion, and sorrow; the total obliteration of everything that goes to make up the physical man.”  This theory of re-births, or transmigration of souls, is very strange and unnatural to our less imaginative and subtile Occidental minds; but to the speculative Orientals it is an attractive and reasonable belief.  They make the “spirit” the immortal part of man, the “soul” being its emotional embodiment, its “spiritual body,” whose unsatisfied desires cause its birth and re-birth into the fleshly form of the physical “body,”—­a very brief and temporary incarnation.  When by the progressive enlightenment of the spirit its longings and desires have been gradually conquered, it no longer needs or has embodiment either of soul or of body; so that, to quote Elliott Coues in Olcott’s “Buddhist Catechism,” “a spirit in a state of conscious formlessness, subject to no further modification by embodiment, yet in full knowledge of its experiences [during its various incarnations], is Nirvanic.”