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BUDDHA AND BUDDHISM.
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may be in his making Buddhism a capital crime, his authority must have been of restricted extent, and the persecution limited to his own principality. The dissemination of Buddhism, however, in the countries beyond the Bay of Bengal does seem to have received a fresh impulse about the sixth or seventh centuries, and this may have been connected with some partial acts of persecution in India, and consequent emigration of the Buddhists; we have no record, however, of its having been universal, and its having been of any great extent may be reasonably doubted: it seems more likely that Buddhism died a natural death. With the discontinuance of the activity of its professors, who, yielding to the indolence which prosperity is apt to engender, ceased to traverse towns and villages in seeking to make proselytes, the Buddhist priest in India sunk into the sloth and ignorance which now characterise the bulk of the priests of the same religion in other countries, especially China, and seem there to be productive of the same result, working the decay and dissolution of the Buddhist religion.
Although expelled from India, and apparently in a state of decline in some of the regions in which it took refuge, Buddhism still numbers amongst its followers a large proportion of the human race. According to Berghaus, as quoted by Lassen, there are four hundred and fifty-five millions of Buddhists, whilst the population of the Christian states is reckoned at four hundred and seventy-four millions: Mohammedans and Hindoos are very much fewer. The enumeration
