INTRODUCTION

FROM

ધા

ROM this little book of travel the unbiased reader may perhaps obtain a furtive glimpse of the grandeur of the Buddhist religion in the early years of the 5th century A.D.

What indeed must have been the cogent influence of that Faith which could impel several of its ministers to undertake, and one to carry through for the Faith's sake, a supremely dangerous expedition, in the glow of which the journeys of St Paul melt into insignificance? For Fa-hsien, the hero of this adventure and the recorder of his own travels, practically walked from Central China across the desert of Gobi, over the Hindu Kush, and through India down to the mouth of the Hoogly, where he took ship and returned by sea, after manifold hairbreadth escapes, to China, bringing with him what he went forth to secure-books of the Buddhist Canon and images of Buddhist deities.

The story of Shakyamuni Buddha's entry into religious life has often been told; by none better than by Professor Rhys Davids, on whose Buddhism the following paragraph is based.

Buddha was the son of a king. In his 29th year an angel appeared to him in four visions

under the form of a man broken down by age, of a sick man, of a decaying corpse, and of a dignified hermit.

Shocked by these sights, he realized the impermanency of all things; and one night, after gazing in an eternal farewell upon his wife who was sleeping with one hand on the head of their child, he tore himself away, mounted his horse, and accompanied only by his charioteer, went out into the world, a poor and homeless wanderer, to achieve the salvation of mankind.

Enough will be gained from Fa-hsien's work to enable the general reader to complete the picture of Buddha's future career on earth.

The Record itself is packed with interesting incidents. Miracles, without which no supernatural religion seems to have a chance of attracting worshippers, are to be found in abundance. References will be found to the instrumental parts of Buddhism, such as the foot-prints, skull, teeth, spittoon, staff, and almsbowl of the World-Honoured One; also to cowries, nuns, elephants, free hospitals, barter with devils, Utopian government, prophecy, extreme duration of life, the appearance of a mighty dragon under the form of a small snake, which is precisely what is said to have happened in Tientsin, 1872, to the glorification of the then

Viceroy, Li Hung-chang, etc., etc. There is an ascent to heaven, a temptation by the king of hell, and even an accusation of immorality; but perhaps the most interesting of all is the frequent reference to the Precious Trinity, of which it may be said in passing that "Precious" best translates the Chinese term, and leaves "Blessed" and "Holy" to the Trinities of the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, respectively.

Various religions have at various times adopted a Trinity of three Persons, suitable to the faith expressed by each. The dogma of the Trinity was introduced into Christianity at a comparatively late date. Nothing was heard of it in the early centuries of the Church, and it was first enunciated in detail as a mystery in the so-called Athanasian Creed, of (?) 4th century, A.D. It is not mentioned in either the Old Testament or the New, the proof of which will be found in the audacious forgery of a verse interpolated in the First Epistle of John, ch. v, verse 8:-"For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one." Some pious but dishonest monk, distressed by the absence of any allusion in the Bible to the doctrine of the Trinity, was determined to supply the missing dogma at all costs;

and his fraud was successful for centuries, until its spurious character, exposed by Porson, resulted in its disappearance from the Revised Version of 1881.

The above point is interesting in the present connexion only in so far as concerns the respective dates of the Buddhist and Christian Trinities of which the former has been alleged by some to have been derived through the Gnostics from the latter, with a similar contention in the opposite direction.

The Trinity of Buddhism has usually been explained as consisting of (1) Buddha, (2) the Law, or better, the Faith, and (3) the Priesthood, or the Church in the abstract. Chu Hsi, the great Chinese philosopher and historian of the 12th century, declared that the Buddhist Trinity comprised (1) the spiritual body of Buddha, (2) his joyful body, as rewarded for his virtues, and (3) his fleshly body, in which he appeared on earth. He further showed that by exhibiting the Trinity under the form of three images, as the Buddhists of the Greater Vehicle in China do in their temples, which of course is a concession to the unimaginative masses,-the transcendent mystery of the real doctrine of Trinity in Unity is altogether obliterated.

Buddhism, which of all religions has the