[Illustration: BRASS IMAGE OF GAUTAMA BUDDHA FROM CEYLON.] He is seated on the Mućalinda Serpent (see p. 480), in an attitude of profound meditation, with eyes half closed, and five rays of light emerging from the crown of his head. [_Frontispiece._ BUDDHISM, IN ITS CONNEXION WITH BRĀHMANISM AND HINDŪISM, AND IN ITS CONTRAST WITH CHRISTIANITY, BY SIR MONIER MONIER-WILLIAMS, K.C.I.E., M.A., HON. D.C.L. OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, HON. LL.D. OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALCUTTA, HON. PH.D. OF THE UNIVERSITY OF GÖTTINGEN, HON. MEMBER OF THE ASIATIC SOCIETIES OF BENGAL AND BOMBAY, AND OF THE ORIENTAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETIES OF AMERICA, BODEN PROFESSOR OF SANSKṚIT, AND LATE FELLOW OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD, ETC. [Illustration: ] NEW YORK: MACMILLAN AND CO. 1889. [_All rights reserved._] PREFACE. The ‘Duff Lectures’ for 1888 were delivered by me at Edinburgh in the month of March. In introducing my subject, I spoke to the following effect:— ‘I wish to express my deep sense of the responsibility which the writing of these Lectures has laid upon me, and my earnest desire that they may, by their usefulness, prove in some degree worthy of the great missionary whose name they bear. ‘Dr. Duff was a man of power, who left his own foot-print so deeply impressed on the soil of Bengal, that its traces are never likely to be effaced, and still serve to encourage less ardent spirits, who are striving to imitate his example in the same field of labour. ‘But not only is the impress of his vigorous personality still fresh in Bengal. He has earned an enduring reputation throughout India and the United Kingdom, as the prince of educational missionaries. He was in all that he undertook an enthusiastic and indefatigable workman, of whom, if of any human being, it might be truly said, that, when called upon to quit the sphere of his labours, “he needed not to be ashamed.” No one can have travelled much in India without having observed how wonderfully the results of his indomitable energy and fervid eloquence in the cause of Truth wait on the memory of his work everywhere. Monuments may be erected and lectureships founded to perpetuate his name and testify to his victories over difficulties which few other men could have overcome, but better than these will be the living testimony of successive generations of Hindū men and women, whose growth and progress in true enlightenment will be due to the seed which he planted, and to which God has given the increase.’