________________
346
BUDDHA AND BUDDHISM.
this is not countenanced by any of the traditions, Bralımanical or Buddhist.
The name of Sakya's father, Suddhodlana, she whose food is pure," — suggests an allegorical signification, and in that of his mother, Máyá, or Máyádeví, “illusion, divine delusion,”—we have a manifest allegorical fiction; his secular appellation as a prince, Siddhartha, "he by whom the end is accomplished,"
- and his religious name, Buddha, “hie by whom all is known," are very much in the style of the Pilgrim's Progress, and the city of his birth, Kapila Vastu, which has no place in the geography of the Hindus*, is of the same description. It is explained, “the tawny site," but it may also be rendered, “the substance of Kapila," intimating, in fact, the Sankhya philosophy, the doctrine of Kapila Muni, upon which the fundamental elements of Buddhism, the eternity of matter, the principles of things, and final extinction, are evidently based. It seems not impossible, after all, that Sákya Muni is an unreal being, and that all that is related of him is as much a fiction as is that of his preceding migrations, and the miracles that attended his birth, his life, and his departure.
At the same time, although we may discredit the actuality of the teacher, we cannot dispute the introduction of the doctrine, and there may have been, about the time attributed to Sákya's death by the southern Buddhists, a person, or what is more likely,
* [But compare L. Vivien de St. Martin in "Mémoires sur les contrées occidentales”, II, 356 ff.]
