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The Seventh Lesson: Buddhism.1245
The Seventh Lesson: Buddhism.
The term “Buddhism” is applied both to the philosophy of Gautama
Buddha, and also to the vast system of religion which has been evolved
from his teachings, with its accompaniment or elaborate ceremonial and
ritual, and which counts its followers to the number of perhaps three
hundred million (300,000,000), principally in China, Japan and Thibet,
and including about ten million (10,000,000) followers in India, chiefly in
Burmah—the number of Buddhists in India proper, the land of its founder,
having decreased until the religion is practically dead in the land of its origin,
its philosophy being kept alive principally by its influence upon the surviving
philosophies. In India, it still numbers followers among the Northern tribes,
and is quite flourishing in the whole Indo-Chinese Peninsula, Burmah,
Ceylon, Napal, etc., but is almost unknown in the centre of India. It claims
millions of followers in China and Japan, which are its great strongholds,
and it has another great centre north of the Himalayas, in Thibet, where
it is the prevailing religion, under the name of Lamaism. It is the popular
religion among the entire Mongolian sections and peoples of Asia, and is
found to the extreme north of Siberia, and even in Lapland. But the present
form of the Buddhist religion, particularly as it appears among the Japanese
and Chinese, and in Thibet—and the North generally—has very little