Book Title: Essays Lectures on Religion of Hindu Vol 02
Author(s): H H Wilson
Publisher: Trubner and Company London

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Page 325
________________ BUDDHA AND BUDDHISM. 315 ninus; and although the account is somewhat confused, there is an evident allusion to Buddhist practices. “There are,” he says, “two divisions of the Gymnosophists, Brachmans, and Samanai,"—not Sarmanai, but Samanai,-"the former are so by birth, the latter by election, consisting of all those who give themselves up to the cultivation of sacred learning: they live in colleges, in dwellings, and temples constructed by the princes, abandoning their families and property: they are summoned to prayer by the ringing of a bell, and live upon rice and fruits.” Cyril of Alexandria also mentions that the Samanæans were the philosophers of the Bactrians, showing the extension of Buddhism beyond the confines of India; and St. Jerome, who, like Cyril, lived at the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth century, was evidently acquainted with Buddhistical legends, for he says that Buddha was believed to have been born of a virgin, and to have come forth from his mother's side. From Cyril of Jerusalem and Ephraim, writers of the middle of the fourth century, we learn that Buddhism tainted some of the heresies of the early Christian Church, especially the Manichæan, which the latter terms the Indian heresy; the former states that Terebinthus, the preceptor of Manes, the Persian Mani, took the name of Baudas. Hyde and Beausobre explain this to mean no more than that the word Terebinthus in Greek was the same as Butam in Chaldaic, a kind of tree; but the word in Cyril is Baudas, not Butem, and it is more likely that Terebinthus

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