“At an early age, Prince Gautama left his royal home, and his wife, and new-born child, and became a wanderer and a mendicant, to seek a way of salvation for man.  Hindu rites, accompanied by the slaughter of innocent victims, repelled his feelings.  Hindu philosophy afforded him no remedy, and Hindu penances and mortifications proved unavailing after he had practised them for years.  At last, by severe contemplation, he discovered the long coveted truth; a holy and calm life, and benevolence and love toward all living creatures seemed to him the essence of religion.  Self-culture and universal love—­this was his discovery—­this is the essence of Buddhism."[8]

From one point of view Buddhism was the logical continuance of Aryan Hindoo philosophy; from another point of view it was a new departure.  The leading idea in the Upanishads is that the object of the wise man should be to know, inwardly and consciously, the Great Soul of all; and by this knowledge his individual soul would become united to the Supreme Being, the true and absolute self.  This was the highest point reached in the old Indian philosophy[9] before Buddha was born.

So, looking at Buddhism in the perspective of Hindu history and thought, we may say that it is doubtful whether Gautama intended to found a new religion.  As, humanly speaking, Saul of Tarsus saved Christianity from being a Jewish sect and made it universal, so Gautama extricated the new enthusiasm of humanity from the priests.  He made Aryan religion the property of all India.  What had been a rare monopoly as narrow as Judaism, he made the inheritance of all Asia.  Gautama was a protestant and a reformer, not an agnostic or skeptic.  It is more probable that he meant to shake off Brahmanism and to restore the pure and original form of the Aryan religion of the Vedas, as far as it was possible to do so.  In one sense, Buddhism was a revolt against hereditary and sacerdotal privilege—­an attack of the people against priestcraft.  The Buddha and his disciples were levellers.  In a different age and clime, but along a similar path, they did a work analogous to that of the so-called Anabaptists in Europe and Independents in England, centuries later.

It is certain, however, that Buddhism has grown logically out of ancient Hinduism.  In its monastic feature—­one of its most striking characteristics—­we see only the concentration and reduction to system, of the old life of the ascetics and religious mendicants recognized and respected by Hinduism.  For centuries the Buddhist monks and nuns were regarded in India as only a new sect of ascetics, among many others which flourished in the land.

The Buddhist doctrine of karma, or in Japanese, ingwa, of cause and effect, whereby it is taught that each effect in this life springs from a cause in some previous incarnation, and that each act in this life bears its fruit in the next, has grown directly out of the Hindu idea of the transmigration of souls.  This idea is first inculcated in the Upanishads, and is recognized in Hindu systems of philosophy.