22(5 L A L L A M
LALLY, Thomas Arthur, Baron de Tollendal, Count de (1702-1766), French general, descended from an old Irish family who emigrated to France along with the Stuarts, was born in Dauphiné in January 1702. His father, colonel in an Irish-French regiment, familiarized him with active service from his boyhood, and he rose step by step in a career distinguished for bravery and conduct till in 1744 he was created a brigadier by Louis XV. on the field of Fontenoy. Previous to this he had been engaged in several plots for the restoration of the Stuarts, and in 1745 he accompanied Charles Edward to Scotland, serving as aide-de-camp at the battle of Falkirk. Escaping in disguise to France, he joined the army of Marshal Saxe in the Low Countries, and for his conduct at the capture of Maastricht in 1748 received the grade of marshal of the camp. When the French in 1756 resolved to fit out an expediton to recover their power in India, Lally was appointed to the chief command. Arriving at Pondicherri in 1758, he alarmed the English by his first successes, and even laid siege to Madras. But he was ill supported by his countrymen, his military chest was empty, and his bravery and zeal were not combined with the qualities necessary for success in Indian administration. Madras was relieved by a British fleet, and the English under Coote assumed the offensive, and inflicted a severe defeat on Lally at Wandiwash. He still made a long and stubborn resistance, but was ultimately besieged in Pondicherri and compelled to surrender in January 1701. Returning to France on parole, he was thrown into prison, Popular indignation at the collapse of French power in India demanded a victim, and the parliament of Paris sentenced him to death on a vague and frivolous accusation. The judicial murder of Lally (9th May 1766) was exposed by Voltaire, and his son Lally-Tollendal obtained in 1778 the formal reversal of the sentence.
LĀMĀISM is partly religious, partly political. Religiously it is the corrupt form of Buddhism prevalent in Tibet and Mongolia. It stands in a relationship to primitive Buddhism similar to that in which Roman Catholicism, so long as the temporal power of the pope was still in existence, stood to primitive Christianity. The ethical and metaphysical ideas most conspicuous in the doctrines of Lāmāism are not confined to the highlands of Central Asia, they are accepted in great measure also in Japan and China. It is the union of these ideas with a hierarchical system, and with the temporal sovereignty of the head of that system in Tibet, which constitutes what is distinctively understood by the term Lāmāism. Lāmāism is hardly calculated to attract much attention for its own sake. Tibetan superstitions and Tibetan politics are alike repugnant to Western minds. But, as so many unfounded beliefs and curious customs have a special value of their own to the student of folklore, so Lāmāism has acquired a special interest to the student of comparative history through the instructive parallel which its history presents to that of the Church of Rome.
The central point of primitive Buddhism was the doctrine of "Arahatship," – a system of ethical and mental self-culture, in which deliverance was found from all the mysteries and sorrows of life in a change of heart to be reached here on earth. This doctrine seems to have been held very nearly in its original points from the time when it was propounded by Gotama in the 5th century B.C. down to the period in which northern India was invaded and conquered by the Huns at about the commencement of the Christian era. At that time there had arisen a school of Buddhist teachers who called their doctrine the "Great Vehicle." It was not in any contradiction to the older doctrine, which they contemptuously called the "Little Vehicle," but included it all, and was based upon it. The distinguishing characteristic of the newer school was the importance which it attached to "Bodisatship." The older school had taught that Gotama, who had propounded the doctrine of Arahatship, was a Buddha, that only a Buddha is capable of discovering that doctrine, and that a Buddha is a man who by self-denying efforts, continued through many hundreds of different births, has acquired the so-called Ten Pāramitās or cardinal virtues in such perfection that he is able, when sin and ignorance have gained the upper hand throughout the world, to save the human race from impending ruin.[1] But until the process of perfection has been completed, until the moment when at last the sage, sitting under the Bo tree, acquires that particular insight or wisdom which is called Enlightenment or Buddhahood, he is still only a Bodisat. And the link of connexion between the various Bodisats in the future Buddha s successive births is not a soul which is transferred from body to body, but the karma, or character, which each successive Bodisat inherits from his predecessors in the long chain of existences. Now the older school also held, in the first place, that, when a man had, in this life, attained to Arahatship, his karma would not pass on to any other individual in another life, – or in other words, that after Arahatship there would be no rebirth; and, secondly, that four thousand years after the Buddha had proclaimed the Dhamma or doctrine of Arahatship, his teaching would have died away, wickedness and ignorance would have increased in the world, and another Buddha would be required to bring mankind once more to a knowledge of the truth. The leaders of the Great Vehicle urged their followers to seek to attain, not so much to Arahatship, which would involve only their own salvation, but to Bodisatship, by the attainment of which they would be conferring the blessings of the Dhamma upon countless multitudes in the long ages of the future. By thus laying stress upon Bodisatship, rather than upon Arahatship, the new school, though they doubtless merely thought themselves to be carrying the older orthodox doctrines to their logical conclusion, were really changing the central point of Buddhism, and were altering the direction of their mental vision. It was of no avail that they adhered in other respects in the main to the older teaching, that they professed to hold to the same ethical system, that they adhered, except in a few unimportant details, to the old regulations of the order of the Buddist mendicant recluses. The ancient books, still preserved to us in the Pāli Pitakas, being mainly occupied with the details of Arahatship, lost their exclusive value in the eyes of those whose attention was being directed to the details of Bodisatship. And the opinion that every leader in their religious circles, every teacher distinguished among them for his sanctity of life, or for his extensive learning, was a Bodisat, who might have and who probably had inherited the karma of some great teacher of old, opened the door to a flood of superstitious fancies.
It is worthy of note that the new school found its earliest professors and its greatest expounders in a part of India which lay outside the districts to which the personal influence of Gotama himself and of his immediate followers had been confined. The home of early Buddhism was round about Kosala and Magadha; in the district, that is to say, north and south of the Ganges between where Allahabad now lies on the west, and Rajgir on the east. The home of the Great Vehicle was, at first, in the countries farther to the north and west, Buddhism arose in countries, subject indeed to Brahman influence, but where the sacred language of the Brahmans was never more than a learned tongue, and where the exclusive
- ↑ See, for instance, the Buddhist Birth Stories, pp. 19-27 and 53-58.
