The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 07, No. 42, April, 1861: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 07, No. 42, April, 1861: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
"Buddhism is one thing. Practices out of which Buddhism may be developed
are another. It has been already suggested that the ideas conveyed by
the terms _Sramanoe_ and _Gymnosophistoe_ are just as Brahminic as
Buddhist, and, _vice versâ_, just as Buddhist as Brahminic.
"The earliest dates of specific Buddhism are of the same age as the
earliest dates of specific Brahminism.
"Clemens of Alexandria mentions Buddhist pyramids, the Buddhist habit of
depositing certain bones in them, the Buddhist practice of foretelling
events, the Buddhist practice of continence, the Buddhist Semnai or holy
virgins. This, however, may he but so much asceticism. He mentions this
and more. He supplies the name Bouta; Bouta being honored as a god.
"From Cyril of Jerusalem we learn that Samnaism was, more or less,
Manichaean,--Manichaeanism being, more or less, Samanist. Terebinthus,
the preceptor of Manes, took the name Baudas. In Epiphanius, Terebinthus
is the pupil of Scythianus.
"Suidas makes Terebinthus a pupil of Baudda, who pretended to be the
son of a virgin. And here we may stop to remark, that the Mongol
Tshingiz-Khan is said to be virgin-born; that, word for word, Scythianus
is Sak; that Sakya Muni (compare it with Manes) is a name of Buddha.
"Be this as it may, there was, before A.D. 300,--
"1. Action and reaction between Buddhism
and Christianity.
"2. Buddhist buildings.
"3. The same cultus in both Bactria and
India.
"Whether this constitute Buddhism is another
question."--Vol. ii. p. 317.
And more of an equally attractive and comprehensible character.
We assure the reader that these extracts are but feeble exponents of the
peculiar power of Mr. Latham's works,--a power of unmitigated dulness.
What his views are on the great questions of the science--the origin
of races, the migrations, the crossings of varieties, and the like--no
mortal can remember, who has penetrated the labyrinth of his researches.
An author of a very different kind is Professor Waiz, whose work on
Anthropology has just reached this country: a writer as philosophic as
Mr. Latham is disconnected; as pleasing and natural in style as the
other is affected; as simply open to the true and good in all customs or
superstitions of barbarous peoples as the Englishman is contemptuous of
everything not modern and European. Waiz seems to us the most careful
and truly scientific author in the field of Ethnology whom we have
had since Prichard, and with the wider scope which belongs to the
intellectual German.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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