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BUDDHA AND BUDDHISM.
krit authorities for seven in the present age of the world, whose praises I have translated (Asiatic Researches, Vol. XVII)* and who are represented in the Ajunta paintings. An eighth, Maitreya, is to come; but these are only a few, confined to certain periods : the number during all the extravagant intervals of Buddhist chronology has no limitation, and there can no more be a first than there can be a last, each passing on his turn to the end and aim of his existence,extinction—nirváúa.
Utter extinction, as the great end and object of life, is also a fundamental, and in some respects a peculiar, feature of Buddhism. Nirvana is literally a blowingont, as if of a candle, -- annihilation: it has been objected to this that Buddhism recognises a system of rewards and punishments after death, and no doubt its cosmology is copiously furnished with heavens and hells; but this it has in common with Brahmanism: it is a part of the scheme of transmigration; the wicked are punished and the good rewarded, but the punishment and reward are only in proportion to their bad or good deeds, and when they have been balanced the individual returns to earth to run up a fresh score, to incur in fact, according to Buddhism, a fresh infliction of suffering, life being the cause of evil from which there is no escape, but by finally ceasing to be. Brahmanical speculation comtemplates, equally with Buddhism, exemption from being born
* [Art. I of this volume.]
