Vedas, and admit rational principles borrowed both from sensualism and
idealism. Among these doctrines Buddhism is the principal.

8. BUDDHISM.--Buddhism is so called from Buddha, a name meaning deified
teacher, which was given to Sakyamuni, or Saint Sakya, a reformer of
Brahmanism, who introduced into the Hindu religion a more simple creed,
and a milder and more humane code of morality. The date of the origin of
this reform is uncertain. It is probably not earlier than the sixth
century B.C. Buddhism, essentially a proselyting religion, spread over
Central Asia and through the island of Ceylon. Its followers in India
being persecuted and expelled from the country, penetrated into Thibet,
and pushing forward into the wilderness of the Kalmucks and Mongols,
entered China and Japan, where they introduced their warship under the
name of the religion of Fo. Buddhism is more extensively diffused than any
other form of religion in the world. Though it has never extended beyond
the limits of Asia, its followers number over four hundred millions.

As a philosophical school, Buddhism partakes both of sensualism and
idealism; it admits sensual perception as the source of knowledge, but it
grants to nature only an apparent existence. On this universal illusion,
Buddhism founded a gigantic system of cosmogony, establishing an infinity
of degrees in the scale of existences from that of pure being without form
or quality to the lowest emanations. According to Buddha, the object of
philosophy, as well as of religion, is the deliverance of the soul from
metempsychosis, and therefore from all pain and illusion. He teaches that
to break the endless rotation of transmigration the soul must be prevented
from being born again, by purifying it even from the desire of existence.
He denied the authority of the Vedas, and abolished or ignored the
division of the people into castes, admitting whoever desired it to the
priesthood. Notwithstanding the doctrine of metempsychosis, and the belief