[5] _“The Way” of a Mohammedan Mystic_, by W. H. T. Gairdner (Leipzig, 1912), pp. 9 f. IV. BUDDHISM Before the Mohammedan conquest of India in the eleventh century, the teaching of Buddha exerted considerable influence in Eastern Persia and Transoxania. We hear of flourishing Buddhist monasteries in Balkh, the metropolis of ancient Bactria, a city famous for the number of Sūfīs who resided in it. Professor Goldziher has called attention to the significant circumstance that the Sūfī ascetic, Ibrāhīm ibn Adham, appears in Moslem legend as a prince of Balkh who abandoned his throne and became a wandering dervish--the story of Buddha over again. The Sūfīs learned the use of rosaries from Buddhist monks, and, without entering into details, it may be safely asserted that the method of Sūfism, so far as it is one of ethical self-culture, ascetic meditation, and intellectual abstraction, owes a good deal to Buddhism. But the features which the two systems have in common only accentuate the fundamental difference between them. In spirit they are poles apart. The Buddhist moralises himself, the Sūfī becomes moral only through knowing and loving God. The Sūfī conception of the passing-away (_fanā_) of individual self in Universal Being is certainly, I think, of Indian origin. Its first great exponent was the Persian mystic, Bāyazīd of Bistām, who may have received it from his teacher, Abū ʿAlī of Sind (Scinde). Here are some of his sayings: “Creatures are subject to changing ‘states,’ but the gnostic has no ‘state,’ because his vestiges are effaced and his essence annihilated by the essence of another, and his traces are lost in another’s traces.” “Thirty years the high God was my mirror, now I am my own mirror,” _i.e._ according to the explanation given by his biographer, “that which I was I am no more, for ‘I’ and ‘God’ is a denial of the unity of God. Since I am no more, the high God is His own mirror.” “I went from God to God, until they cried from me in me, ‘O Thou I!’”