attention, as far as it was not engaged upon their hierarchy of mythological beings, to questions of metaphysical speculation, which, in the earliest Buddhism, are not only discouraged but forbidden. We find long treatises on the nature of being, idealistic dreams which have as little to do with the Bodhisatship that is concerned with the salvation of the world as with the Arahatship that is concerned with the perfect life. Only one lower step was possible, and that was not long in being taken. The animism common alike to the untaught Huns and to their Hindu conquerors, but condemned in early Buddhism, was allowed to revive. As the stronger side of Gotama’s teaching was neglected, the debasing belief in rites and ceremonies, and charms and incantations, which had been the especial object of his scorn, began to spread like the Bīrana weed warmed by a tropical sun in marsh and muddy soil. As in India, after the expulsion of Buddhism, the degrading worship of Śiva and his dusky bride had been incorporated into Hinduism from the savage devil worship of Āryan and of non-Āryan tribes, so, as pure Buddhism died away in the north, the Tantra system, a mixture of magic and witchcraft and sorcery, was incorporated into the corrupted Buddhism.
The founder of this system seems to have been Asanga, an
influential monk of Peshāwar, who wrote the first text-book of
the creed, the Yogāchchāra Bhūmi Śāstra, in the 6th
century A.D. Hsüan Tsang, who travelled in the first
half of the 7th, found the monastery where Asanga had
The
Tantra
system.
lived in ruins, and says that he had lived one thousand
years after the Buddha.[1] Asanga managed with great dexterity
to reconcile the two opposing systems by placing a number of
Śaivite gods or devils, both male and female, in the inferior
heavens of the then prevalent Buddhism, and by representing
them as worshippers and supporters of the Buddha and of
Avalokiteśvara. He thus made it possible for the half-converted
and rude tribes to remain Buddhists while they brought offerings,
and even bloody offerings, to these more congenial shrines, and
while their practical belief had no relation at all to the Truths
or the Noble Eightfold Path, but busied itself almost wholly
with obtaining magic powers (Siddhi), by means of magic phrases
(Dhārani), and magic circles (Maṇḍala). Asanga’s happy idea
bore but too ample fruit. In his own country and Nepāl, the
new wine, sweet and luscious to the taste of savages, completely
disqualified them from enjoying any purer drink; and now in
both countries Śaivism is supreme, and Buddhism is even nominally
extinct, except in some outlying districts of Nepāl. But this
full effect has only been worked out in the lapse of ages; the
Tantra literature has also had its growth and its development,
and some unhappy scholar of a future age may have to trace
its loathsome history. The nauseous taste repelled even the
self-sacrificing industry of Burnouf, when he found the later
Tantra books to be as immoral as they are absurd. “The pen,”
he says, “refuses to transcribe doctrines as miserable in respect
of form as they are odious and degrading in respect of meaning.”
Such had been the decline and fall of Buddhism considered as an ethical system before its introduction into Tibet. The manner in which its order of mendicant recluses, at first founded to afford better opportunities to those who wished to carry out that system in practical life, developed at last into a hierarchical monarchy will best be understood by a sketch of the history of Tibet.
Its real history commences with Srong Tsan Gampo, who was born a little after 600 A.D., and who is said in the Chinese chronicles to have entered, in 634, into diplomatic relationship with Tai Tsung, one of the emperors of the Tang dynasty. He was the founder of the present Early political history. capital of Tibet, now known as Lhasa; and in the year 622 (the same year as that in which Mahomet fled from Mecca) he began the formal introduction of Buddhism into Tibet. For this purpose he sent the minister Thumi Sambhota, afterwards looked upon as an incarnation of Mañju-śrī, to India, there to collect the sacred books, and to learn and translate them. Thumi Sambhota accordingly invented an alphabet for the Tibetan language on the model of the Indian alphabets then in use. And, aided by the king, who is represented to have been an industrious student and translator, he wrote the first books by which Buddhism became known in his native land. The most famous of the works ascribed to him is the Mani Kambum, “the Myriad of Precious Words”—a treatise chiefly on religion, but which also contains an account of the introduction of Buddhism into Tibet, and of the closing part of the life of Srong Tsan Gampo. He is also very probably the author of another very ancient standard work of Tibetan Buddhism, the Samatog, a short digest of Buddhist morality, on which the civil laws of Tibet have been founded. It is said in the Mani Kambum to have fallen from heaven in a casket (Tibetan, samatog), and, like the last-mentioned work, is only known to us in meagre abstract.
King Srong Tsan Gampo’s zeal for Buddhism was shared and supported by his two queens, Bribsun, a princess from Nepāl, and Wen Ching, a princess from China. They are related to have brought with them sacred relics, books and pictures, for whose better preservation two large monasteries were erected. These are the cloisters of La Brang (Jokhang) and Ra Moché, still, though much changed and enlarged, the most sacred abbeys in Tibet, and the glory of Lhasa. The two queens have become semi-divine personages, and are worshipped under the name of the two Dārā-Eke, the “glorious mothers,” being regarded as incarnations of the wife of Śiva, representing respectively two of the qualities which she personifies, divine vengeance and divine love. The former is worshipped by the Mongolians as Okkin Tengri, “the Virgin Goddess”; but in Tibet and China the rôle of the divine virgin is filled by Kwan Yin, a personification of Avalokiteśvara as the heavenly word, who is often represented with a child in her arms. Srong Tsan Gampo has also become a saint, being looked upon as an incarnation of Avalokiteśvara; and the description in the ecclesiastical historians of the measures he took for the welfare of his subjects do great credit to their ideal of the perfect Buddhist king. He is said to have spent his long reign in the building of reservoirs, bridges and canals; in the promotion of agriculture, horticulture and manufactures; in the establishment of schools and colleges; and in the maintenance of justice and the encouragement of virtue. But the degree of his success must have been slight. For after the death of himself and of his wives Buddhism gradually decayed, and was subjected by succeeding kings to cruel persecutions; and it was not till more than half a century afterwards, under King Kir Song de Tsan, who reigned 740–786, that true religion is acknowledged by the ecclesiastical historians to have become firmly established in the land.
This monarch again sent to India to replace the sacred books
that had been lost, and to invite Buddhist pandits to translate
them. The most distinguished of those who came
were Śānta Rakshita, Padma Sambhava and Kamala
Śīla, for whom, and for their companions, the king
The
Tibetan
sacred
books.
built a splendid monastery still existing, at Samje,
about three days’ journey south-east of Lhasa. It was to them
that the Tibetans owed the great collection of what are still
regarded as their sacred books—the Kandjur. It consists of
100 volumes containing 689 works, of which there are two or
three complete sets in Europe, one of them in the India Office
library. A detailed analysis of these scriptures has been published
by the celebrated Hungarian scholar Csoma de Körös,
whose authoritative work has been republished in French with
complete indices and very useful notes by M. Léon Feer. These
volumes contain about a dozen works of the oldest school of
Buddhism, the Hīnayāna, and about 300 works, mostly very
short, belonging to the Tantra school. But the great bulk of
the collection consists of Mahāyāna books, belonging to all
the previously existing varieties of that widely extended Buddhist
sect; and, as the Sanskrit originals of many of these writings
are now lost, the Tibetan translations will be of great value,
not only for the history of Lāmāism, but also for the history of
the later forms of Indian Buddhism.
The last king’s second son, Lang Darma, concluded in May 822
- ↑ Watters’s Yūan Chwāng, edited by Rhys Davids and Bushell, i. 210, 356, 271.
