Having exercised his public ministry for forty years--without, as would appear, encountering any great opposition--and having committed his work to the Brotherhood, to carry on after his decease, Buddha died, aged about eighty, and was buried with great pomp. It is recorded that, as the time of his departure drew nigh, he replied to his disciples' expressions of apprehension and sorrow, by saying that when he should no longer be with them in person, he would still be present with them in his sayings, in his doctrine. Another point on which he laid great stress before his death was that the Brotherhood should regularly assemble in convocation. Hence it came about that from very early times, the declaration, "I seek refuge in Buddha, Dharma (the Law), Samgha (the Brotherhood)," was adopted as the formula which any one, desirous of becoming a Buddhist, was required to profess. And it is the Trinity thus formed, which, represented to-day by the three great images above the altar of many a Buddhist temple, has its multitude of ignorant worshippers, who doubt not that three several divinities are the objects of their adoration and their prayer.
Such, then, as would appear, was the origin of Buddhism. Strictly speaking, and apart from its later developments, Buddhism is a religion which knows no God, which attaches no value to prayer, which has no place for a priesthood. Nowhere, perhaps, is its agnosticism more conspicuous than in the five main prohibitions, which are addressed alike to clergy and laity. The _first_ of these forbids the taking of life,--human life chiefly, but other life as well; the _second_ is against theft, whether by force or fraud; the _third_ is against falsehood; the _fourth_ forbids impurity, in act, word, or thought; the _fifth_ requires abstinence from all intoxicants. The whole idea of _GOD_, it will be noticed, is entirely absent from the Buddhist Commandments. Infinitely removed above that other agnosticism, which cries, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," Buddhism starts with the idea of the entire abnegation of self. But a self-denial that is undertaken, not for God, and in God for man, but merely to secure one's own peace and well-being--what is this but selfishness after all? Enjoining a rule of life that is essentially negative--the natural product of that blank despair of the world and of human nature which led to the Great Renunciation--Buddhism, as a religious system, has yielded but scanty fruits of positive holiness, of active benevolence. And yet,--wholly inadequate as such a system as this, even at its purest and best, must be to meet the needs of humanity,--false and even debased as are sometimes its teachings,--the one great message that Buddhism proclaims is a message of undeniable, if most imperfect, truth: the truth that would have man cultivate self-reliance, and attain to self-deliverance by means of self-control. "Work out your own salvation" is the injunction of Christianity. "By one's self," taught Sakya-muni, "the evil is one; by one's self must come remedy and release." So far the two systems are at one; the difference between them lies in the fact that the one places in our hands those supernatural weapons which alone make real victory possible, and that these the other knows not how to supply.