And in reality Buddha’s anti-matrimonial doctrines _did_ excite opposition. The people murmured and said, ‘He is come to bring childlessness among us, and widowhood, and destruction of family-life.’ Indeed, the two facts—first, that the foundations of Buddhism were not laid (as those of Christianity notably are), on the hallowed hearth of home and on the sacred rock of family-life with its daily round of honest work; and—secondly, that the precept enjoining monkhood and abstinence from marriage was not combined with any organized ecclesiastical hierarchy under a central government, are sufficient to account for the circumstance that Buddhism never gained any real stability in India. No doubt lay-brethren were always welcomed; but they were bound to Buddhism by very slender ties in regard to dogma, and were only expected to conform to the simplest possible code of morality. Probably the only form of admission for a layman was the repetition of the 24 syllables of the three-refuge (tri-ṡaraṇa) formula:—‘I go for refuge to the Buddha, his Law and his Order’ (p. 78). It was of course understood that he was to abstain from the five gross sins (p. 126), but he was already bound to do so by the rules of Hindū caste and family-religion. The chief test of his Buddhism was his readiness to serve the monks. It was for this reason, I think, that lay-adherents were not called, as might have been expected, Ṡrāvakas, ‘Hearers,’ but simply Upāsakas, ‘Servers,’ and in the case of women Upāsikās. They could not be called disciples of Buddha in the _truest sense_, unless they entered his monastic Order. Of course the majority of Buddhist householders never cared to do this. Their chief religion consisted in giving food and clothing, earned by daily toil, to the monks[42]. If they failed in this, there was only one punishment. They were forbidden the privilege of giving at all, and so of accumulating a store of merit. No monk was allowed to ask them for a single thing. Of course, too, the majority of Buddhist householders were worldly-minded; they were no believers in ultra-pessimistic views of life. They looked for a life in some heaven, not Nirvāṇa. Yet in theory all laymen might enter the paths of sanctification (p. 132), and thousands of earnest men are said to have done so[43]. A layman’s progress, however, towards Arhatship, except through monkhood and abandoning the world, was almost hopelessly barred. At page 264 of the Milinda-pañha it is implied that an earnest layman might become an Arhat, even while still a layman, but he had either to enter monkhood or else to pass away in Pari-nirvāṇa (p. 140) at the moment of becoming so.