The Religion of The Chinese illustrated

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1912 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VII Buddhism--II Certainly the career of Buddhism cannot be said to have been a happy one. I think that, on account of its noble principles of humanitarianism, it might have deserved a better fate. It had no lasting success in India, where it was born; Brahmanism and Shivaism there have actually superseded, not to say destroyed it. Nor has it met with better fortune in the empire of China. There it has never been able to supplant Confucianism, the religion of the state. On the contrary, after some centuries of considerable prosperity and growth, a strong reaction against it set in from the Confucian side, reducing in course of time the church and its monachism to the pitiable state in which we know it at the present day. We have already read something on this topic in Chapter IV, in the pages relating to the Confucian spirit of intolerance and persecution, and have seen that the church was not destroyed totally, since in particular the worship of the dead saved it. Salloo vation of the dead was, indeed, an art which no other religion could exercise in so high a degree of perfection; no other but Buddha's church, in obedience to the commandments of Brahma's Net, could redeem the departed from hell, and could elevate them to arhatship, to dewaship, nay, the dignity of the bodhisattwas and even the buddhas. To this august end the church had its magical sutras, its tantras, or spells. It practised to the same purpose its wonderful dhyana art, for by fixedly imagining that the souls in hell, hungry, thirsty, indescribably miserable, are fed, clothed, refreshed and released, the clergy magically refreshed and redeemed them in reality. There was even more: Amitabha, the buddha of the paradise, and Kwanyin or Avalokitecvara, the goddess...