ere were
no books: the mind found exercise and knowledge in conversation. A
monastery was not a permanent residence, except during the rainy season,
but merely a halting-place for the brethren who were habitually
wanderers, continually hearing and seeing something new. Hermits and
solitary dwellers in the forests were not unknown but assuredly the
majority of the brethren had no intention of secluding themselves from
the intellectual life of the age. What would Gotama have done had he
lived some hundreds or thousands of years later? I see no reason to
doubt that he would have encouraged the study of literature and science.
He would probably have praised all art which expresses noble and
spiritual ideas, while misdoubting representations of sensuous beauty.

The second criticism--that Buddhists are prone to corrupt their faith--is
just, for their courteous acquiescence in other creeds enfeebles and
denaturalizes their own. In Annam, Korea and some parts of China though
there are temples and priests more or less deserving the name of
Buddhist, there is no idea that Buddhism is a distinct religion or mode
of life. Such statements as that the real religion of the Burmese is not
Buddhism but animism are, I think, incorrect, but even the Burmese are
dangerously tolerant.

This weakness is not due to any positive defect, since Buddhism provides
for those who lead the higher life a strenuous curriculum and for the
laity a system of morality based on rational grounds and differing
little from the standard accepted in both Europe and China, except that
it emphasizes the duties of mankind to animals. The weakness comes from
the absence of any command against superstitious rites and beliefs. When
the cardinal principles of Buddhism are held strongly these accessories
do not matter, but the time comes when the creeper which was once an
ornament grows into the walls of the shrine and splits the masonry. The
faults of western religions are mainly faults of self-assertion--such as
the Inquisition and opposition to science. The faults of Indian
religions are mainly tolerance of what does not belong to them and
sometimes of what is not only foreign to them but bad in itself.

Buddhism has been both praised and blamed as a religion which
acknowledges neither God nor the soul[88] and its acceptance in its
later phases of the supernatural has been regarded as proving the human
mind's natural need of theism. But it is rather an illustratio