Sudras and the outcasts are forbidden to read the sacred books, and for
any one of the upper classes to teach a serf how to expiate sin is a
crime.

BUDDHISM.--In the fifth century before our era, a great teacher and
reformer, known as Buddha, or Gautama (died about 470 B.C.), arose in
India. He was a prince, whom legend represents as being so touched by the
universal misery of mankind, that he voluntarily abandoned the luxury of
his home, and spent his life in seeking out and making known to men a new
and better way of salvation. He condemned the severe penances and the
self-torture of the Brahmans, yet commended poverty and retirement from
active life as the best means of getting rid of desire and of attaining
_Nirvana_, that is, the repose of unconsciousness.

[Illustration: STATUE OF BUDDHA.]

Buddha admitted all classes to the benefits of religion, the poor outcast
as well as the high-born Brahman, and thus Buddhism was a revolt against
the earlier harsh and exclusive system of Brahmanism. It holds somewhat
the same relation to Brahmanism that Christianity bears to Judaism.

Buddhism gradually gained the ascendancy over Brahmanism; but after some
centuries the Brahmans regained their power, and by the eighth century
after Christ, the faith of Buddha was driven out of almost every part of
India. But Buddhism has a profound missionary spirit, like that of
Christianity, Buddha having commanded his disciples to make known to all
men the way to Nirvana and consequently during the very period when India
was being lost, the missionaries of the reformed creed were spreading the
teachings of their master among the peoples of all the countries of
Eastern Asia, so that to-day Buddhism is the religion of almost one third