The relation between the laity and the Church in Buddhism is curious and has had serious consequences for both good and evil.  The layman “takes refuge” in the Buddha, his law and his church but does not swear exclusive allegiance:  to follow supplementary observances is not treasonable, provided they are not in themselves objectionable.  The Buddha prescribed no ceremonies for births, deaths and marriages and apparently expected the laity to continue in the observance of such rites as were in use.  To-day in China and Japan the good layman is little more than one who pays more attention to Buddhism than to other faiths.  This charitable pliancy had much to do with the victories of Buddhism in the Far East, where it had to struggle against strong prejudices and could hardly have made its way if it had been intolerant of local deities.  But in India we see the disadvantages of the omission to make the laity members of a special corporation and the survival of the Jains, who do form such a corporation, is a clear object lesson.  Social life in India tends to combine men in castes or in communities which if not castes in the technical sense have much the same character.  Such communities have great vitality so long as they maintain their peculiar usages, but when they cease to do so they soon disintegrate and are reabsorbed.  Buddhism from the first never took the form of a corporation.  The special community which it instituted was the sangha or body of monks.  Otherwise, it aimed not at founding a sect but at including all the world as lay believers on easy terms.  This principle worked well so long as the faith was in the ascendent but its effect was disastrous when decline began.  The line dividing Buddhist laymen from ordinary Hindus became less and less marked:  distinctive teaching was found only in the monasteries:  these became poorly recruited and as they were gradually deserted or destroyed by Mohammedans the religion of the Buddha disappeared from his native land.

Even in the monasteries the doctrine taught bore a closer resemblance to Hinduism than to the preaching of Gotama and it is this absence of the protestant spirit, this pliant adaptability to the ideas of each age, which caused Indian Buddhism to lose its individuality and separate existence.  In some localities its disappearance and absorption were preceded by a monstrous phase, known as Tantrism or Saktism, in which the worst elements of Hinduism, those which would have been most repulsive to Gotama, made an unnatural alliance with his church.

I treat of Tantrism and Saktism in another chapter.  The original meaning of Tantra as applied to literary compositions is a simplified manual.[297] Thus we hear of Vishnuite Tantras and in this sense there is a real similarity between Buddhist and tantric teaching, for both set aside Brahmanic tradition as needlessly complicated and both profess to preach a simple and practical road to salvation.  But in Hinduism