Religion I 71
our competitor. It seems not improbable that the persecutions which drove Buddhism from India, its birth-place, where it had greatly flourished for centuries, were due to excesses of the monastic orders. The people were unable to see the Enlightened One through the dark cloud of his nominal followers ; no reformer arose to correct the abuses from within, and away they were swept, abuses and monasteries and all, and have never yet reappeared in India. Ceylon, Burmah, Siam, Tibet, China, and Japan (after a fashion), these are the lands where Gautama is now worshipped.
The early persecution of the monks by a Tibetan king suggests that their organisations were full of the spirit which caused their destruction in India, but has eventually caused their triumph in Tibet. Here they proved the stronger, partly because the people were more ignorant, more superstitious in their bleak mountain homes, and partly because of the external pressure already mentioned. When the purification due to persecution had again changed to decay, another effort, this by reformation, took place in the fourteenth century. There arose one who, himself a lama, cried out against the abuses of the lamas in their private lives and in their relations with the people. Tsongkapa's work has been corn-pared by Catholics to Hildebrand's, by Protestants to Luther's. There is indeed a similarity but also a marked distinction between the Tibetan and the German reformer.
Lamaism had not developed a power as concentrated as that of Rome. It was not necessary to break from an all-including organisation, nor did
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