It will be easily understood that, as a great portion of the following pages had to be delivered in the form of Lectures, occasional repetitions and recapitulations were unavoidable, but I trust I shall not be amenable to the charge of repeating anything for the sake of ‘padding.’ I shall, with more justice, be accused of ‘cramming,’ in the sense of attempting to force too much information into a single volume. _January 1, 1889._ POSTSCRIPT. Since writing the foregoing prefatory remarks, I have observed with much concern that a prevalent error, in regard to Buddhism, is still persistently propagated. It is categorically stated in a newspaper report of a quite recent lecture, that out of the world’s population of about 1500 millions at least 500 millions are Buddhists, and that Buddhism numbers more adherents than any other religion on the surface of the globe. Almost every European writer on Buddhism, of late years, has assisted in giving currency to this utterly erroneous calculation, and it is high time that an attempt should be made to dissipate a serious misconception. It is forgotten that mere sympathizers with Buddhism, who occasionally conform to Buddhistic practices, are not true Buddhists. In China the great majority are first of all Confucianists and then either Tāoists or Buddhists or both. In Japan Confucianism and Shintoism co-exist with Buddhism. In some other Buddhist countries a kind of Shamanism is practically dominant. The best authorities (including the Oxford Professor of Chinese, as stated in the Introduction to his excellent work ‘The Travels of Fā-hien’) are of opinion that there are not more than 100 millions of real Buddhists in the world, and that Christianity with its 430 to 450 millions of adherents has now the numerical preponderance over all other religions. I am entirely of the same opinion. I hold that the Buddhism, described in the following pages, contained within itself, from the earliest times, the germs of disease, decay, and death (see p. 557), and that its present condition is one of rapidly increasing disintegration and decline. We must not forget that Buddhism has disappeared from India proper, although it dominates in Ceylon and Burma, and although a few Buddhist travellers find their way back to the land of its origin and sojourn there. Indeed, if I were called upon to give a rough comparative numerical estimate of the six chief religious systems of the world, I should be inclined, on the whole, to regard Confucianism as constituting, next to Christianity, the most numerically prevalent creed. We have to bear in mind the immense populations, both in China and Japan, whose chief creed is Confucianism.