religion
without a god and without rites; it ordains only that one shall love
his neighbor and become better; annihilation is offered as supreme
recompense. But, for the first time in the history of the world, it
preaches self-renunciation, the love of others, equality of mankind,
charity and tolerance. The Brahmans made bitter war upon it and
extirpated it in India. Missionaries carried it to the barbarians in
Ceylon, in Indo-China, Thibet, China, and Japan. It is today the
religion of about 500,000,000[26] people.

=Changes in Buddhism.=--During these twenty centuries Buddhism has
undergone change. Buddha had himself formed communities of monks.
Those who entered these renounced their family, took the vow of
poverty and chastity; they had to wear filthy rags and beg their
living. These religious rapidly multiplied; they founded convents in
all Eastern Asia, gathered in councils to fix the doctrine, proclaimed
dogmas and rules. As they became powerful they, like the Brahmans,
came to esteem themselves as above the rest of the faithful. "The
layman," they said, "plight to support the religious and consider
himself much honored that the holy man accepts his offering. It is
more commendable to feed one religious than many thousands of laymen."
In Thibet the religious, men and women together, constitute a fifth of
the entire population, and their head, the Grand Lama, is venerated
as an incarnation of God.

At the same time that they transformed themselves into masters, the
Buddhist religious constructed a complicated theology, full of
fantastic figures. They say there is an infinite number of worlds. If
one surrounded with a wall a space capable of holding 100,000 times
ten millions of those worlds, if this wall were raised to heaven, and
if the whole space were filled with grains of mustard, the number of
the grains would not even then equal one-half the number of worlds
which occupy but one division of heaven. All these worlds are full of
creatures, gods, men, beasts, demons, who are born and who die. The
universe itself is annihilated and another takes its place. The
duration of each universe is called _kalpa_; and this is the way we
obtain an impression of a kalpa: if there were a rock twelve miles in
height, breadth, and length, and if once in a century it were only
touched with a piece of the finest linen, this rock would be worn and
reduced to the size of a kernel of mango before a quarter of a kalpa
had elapse