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BUDDHA AND BUDDHISM.
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portion of heretics. It has been already conjectured that this was the term of its vitality, and that the seventh century witnessed its disappearance from the continent of India. Traces of Buddhism lingered, no doubt, till a much later period, as is shewn by the inscription found at Sárnáth as late as the eleventh century * ; but it was then limited to a few localities, and had shifted its scene to the regions bordering on its birth-place, being shortly afterwards so utterly obliterated in India Proper, that by the sixteentlı century the highest authority in the country, the intelligent minister of an inquiring king, the minister of Akbar, Abulfazl, could not find an individual to give him an account of its doctrines.
It would be impossible, in the limited time at our disposal, to enter upon a detail of what those doctrines are; but I may briefly advert to one or two of those which may be regarded as most characteristic. Some of those which are common to Buddhists and Brahmans have been noticed, and of those which are peculiar, the difference is rather in degree than in substance.
Thus the attribution to a Buddha of power and sanctity, infinitely superior to that of the Gods, is only a development of the notion that the gods could be made subject to the will of a mortal, by his performance of superhuman austerities; only the Buddhists ascribed it to the perfection of the internal
* [Lassen, Ind. Alt., III, 741 ff.]
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