“By one’s self,” taught Sakya-muni, “the evil is one; by one’s self must come remedy and release.” So far the two systems are at one; the difference between them lies in the fact that the one places in our hands those supernatural weapons which alone make real victory possible, and that these the other knows not how to supply. Hitherto, we have made no reference to the relation of Buddhism to Brahmanism. And yet we can no more hope to understand the work of Sakya-muni, without observing its connexion with Brahmanism, than we could afford to omit all mention of the Jewish Law and of Jewish Pharisaism, in speaking of the liberation wrought by our Lord Jesus Christ. The work and doctrine of Gautama Buddha,—with their mean between an ascetic severity, on the one hand, and a licentious self-indulgence on the other—their disregard of caste distinctions—their rejection of burdensome and profitless traditions—may be said to bear to the heavy yoke of Brahmanism a relation not dissimilar to that which freedom has to bondage. Laying hold of that which was ready to his hand, if so be he might mould and purify it, Buddha was a liberator and reformer in respect to what had gone before. Let us take, for example, the doctrine of metempsychosis, or, as it is commonly called, the “transmigration of souls.” No doubt, there is a great deal connected with this doctrine in the Buddhist books that cannot but appear to us puerile and shocking; but still, we do not well, we do not justly, if, as do so many, we fasten such strange fancies on Buddha, or on Buddhism, as though it were from these that they sprang. So far from Sakya-muni being the originator of the theory of transmigration, a belief in it had, for centuries previously, been almost universal throughout the East; and his doctrine of Nirvana supplied an antidote to the belief in a practically interminable series of metempsychoses current at the time. With the theory of transmigration accepted on all sides, Buddha seems to have made use of it to the extent that he did, as affording a convenient solution of the difficulty presented by the unequal distribution of happiness in this life, and the absence of any satisfactory exercise of justice in the way of reward or punishment.