ulative thought become a matter of
established habit and intellectual necessity, that no attempt seems ever
to have been made by the leading theological party to put down such
heretical doctrines, so long as the sacred character of the privileges
of their caste was not openly called in question. Yet internal
dissensions on such cardinal points of belief could not but weaken the
authority of the hierarchical body; and as they spread beyond the
narrow bounds of the Brahmanical schools, it wanted but a man of moral
and intellectual powers, and untrammelled by class prejudices, to render
them fatal to priestly pretensions. Such a man arose in the person of a
Sakya prince of Kapilavastu, Gotama, the founder of Buddhism (about the
6th century B.C.). Had it only been for the philosophical tenets of
Buddha, they need scarcely have caused, and probably did not cause, any
great uneasiness to the orthodox theologians. He did, indeed, go one
step beyond Kapila, by altogether denying the existence of the soul as a
substance, and admitting only certain intellectual faculties as
attributes of the body, perishable with it. Yet the conception which
Buddha substituted for the transmigratory soul, viz. that of _karma_
("work"), as the sum total of the individual's good and bad actions,
being the determinative element of the form of his future existence,
might have been treated like any other speculative theory, but for the
practical conclusions he drew from it. Buddha recognized the institution
of caste, and accounted for the social inequalities attendant thereon as
being the effects of _karma_ in former existences. But, on the other
hand, he altogether denied the revealed character of the Veda and the
efficacy of the Brahmanical ceremonies deduced from it, and rejected the
claims of the sacerdotal class to be the repositaries and divinely
appointed teachers of sacred knowledge. That Buddha never questioned the
truth of the Brahmanical theory of transmigration shows that this early
product of speculative thought had become firmly rooted in the Hindu
mind as a tenet of belief amounting to moral conviction. To the Hindu
philosopher this doctrine seemed alone to account satisfactorily for the
apparent essential similarity of the vital element in all animate
beings, no less than for what elsewhere has led honest and logical
thinkers to the stern dogma of predestination. The belief in eternal
bliss or punishment, as the just recompense of man's