Great Indian Religion

Author(s): G T Bettany
Publisher: Ward Lock Bowden and Co

Page 83

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INFLUENCE OF BUDDHISM. Vishnu. He preached a religion of faith to Hindus and Mohammedans alike; but he laid great stress on obedience to religious teachers. By contemplation rather than ritual he taught that the soul would find liberty from the imperfections and sins of the body. After death the soul of the believer would dwell for ever in a heaven of perfect beauty, or in the presence of Vishnu himself, known in his supreme essence.
After the death of Chaitanya there appeared teachers who lowered the spiritual level of Vishnuism, some preaching the religion of enjoyment, others giving increased importance to the idea of physical love; one adoring the infant Krishna as the cowherd. VallabhaSwami (sixteenth century) was one of the chief of these; he established a ritual of eight services in which the image of Krishna as a lovely boy is bathed, anointed, sumptuously dressed and fed, and in which beautiful women and other sensual delights figure largely. Such a religion appealed largely to the well-to-do, the luxurious, and the sensually minded, and was made the pretext for self-indulgence.
Before particularising the forms of modern Hindu worship, we must briefly indicate the influence which Buddhism and other popular religions of India have Influence of had on Hinduism. The brotherhood of man Buddhism. is implicitly if not explicitly recognised by many of the Hindu sects; the Buddhist communities or monasteries are reproduced in the monastic houses of many Hindu brotherhoods. Sir W. Hunter describes the rules of the Vishnuite communities as Buddhistic, with Brahmanical reasons. One of the brotherhoods of Kabir's followers has as its first rule the very Buddhistic one that the life neither of man nor of beast may be taken, the reason being that it is the gift of God. Truth is enjoined as the great principle of conduct; for all ills and ignorance of God spring from original falsehood. Retirement from the world is commended, worldliness being hostile to tranquillity of soul and meditation on God. Similarly the Buddhist trinity of ideas, Buddha, Dharma (the Law), and Samgha (the congregation) is largely present, more