Among the rules that Buddha laid down for his disciples were—­to keep the body pure; not to enter upon affairs of trade; to have no lands and cattle, or houses, or money; to abhor all hypocrisy and dissimulation; to be kind to everything that lives; never to take the life of any living being; to control the passions; to eat food only to satisfy hunger; not to feel resentment from injuries; to be patient and forgiving; to avoid covetousness, and never to tire of self-reflection.  His fundamental principles are purity of mind, chastity of life, truthfulness, temperance, abstention from the wanton destruction of animal life, from vain pleasures, from envy, hatred, and malice.  He does not enjoin sacrifices, for he knows no god to whom they can be offered; but “he proclaimed the brotherhood of man, if he did not reveal the fatherhood of God.”  He insisted on the natural equality of all men,—­thus giving to caste a mortal wound, which offended the Brahmans, and finally led to the expulsion of his followers from India.  He protested against all absolute authority, even that of the Vedas.  Nor did he claim, any more than Confucius, originality of doctrines, only the revival of forgotten or neglected truths.  He taught that Nirvana was not attained by Brahmanical rites, but by individual virtues; and that punishment is the inevitable result of evil deeds by the inexorable law of cause and effect.

Buddhism is essentially rationalistic and ethical, while Brahmanism is a pantheistic tendency to polytheism, and ritualistic even to the most offensive sacerdotalism.  The Brahman reminds me of a Dunstan,—­the Buddhist of a Benedict; the former of the gloomy, spiritual despotism of the Middle Ages,—­the latter of self-denying monasticism in its best ages.  The Brahman is like Thomas Aquinas with his dogmas and metaphysics; the Buddhist is more like a mediaeval freethinker, stigmatized as an atheist.  The Brahman was so absorbed with his theological speculation that he took no account of the sufferings of humanity; the Buddhist was so absorbed with the miseries of man that the greatest blessing seemed to be entire and endless rest, the cessation of existence itself,—­since existence brought desire, desire sin, and sin misery.  As a religion Buddhism is an absurdity; in fact, it is no religion at all, only a system of moral philosophy.  Its weak points, practically, are the abuse of philanthropy, its system of organized idleness and mendicancy, the indifference to thrift and industry, the multiplication of lazy fraternities and useless retreats, reminding us of monastic institutions in the days of Chaucer and Luther.  The Buddhist priest is a mendicant and a pauper, clothed in rags, begging his living from door to door, in which he sees no disgrace and no impropriety.  Buddhism failed to ennoble the daily occupations of life, and produced drones and idlers and religious vagabonds.  In its corruption it lent itself to idolatry, for the Buddhist temples are filled with hideous images of all sorts of repulsive deities, although Buddha himself did not hold to idol worship any more than to the belief in a personal God.