No; this excessive multiplication of images took its origin from another motive, not a very creditable one, perhaps, but nevertheless forced upon them in a great measure by the despotic form of government under which they lived.
Regular taxation in proportion to wealth being unknown among them, the ruler of a province in want of supplies for his own or the public service, proceeded in a manner not quite unknown to the rulers of more civilized nations—that is to say, he first discovered the whereabouts of treasure by secret agency, and then set about extracting the same by the aid of an armed force.
Suspected individuals, having failed to succumb to the exigencies of torture, often paid the penalty of their real or imaginary wealth with their lives; and such continual insecurity necessarily drove them to other expedients.
In the reign of our first Edward it was found necessary to pass a statute forbidding landowners to place their property within “Sanctuary” of the Church without their king’s consent; and the practice that occasioned the necessity for this enactment was in a way analogous to the motives that led to the erection of temples and images in Burmah. The images of Gautama were covered with gold and silver foil; and the natives were somewhat of experts in carpentry and metallurgy, having, like the Chinese, attained to a certain standard, at which point their fertility of resource ended.
Dedication to Gautama or to Buddha implied one and the same thing, in spite of the latter having ceased to exist here and hereafter, while the former was still undergoing transmigrations as tiger, crow, lizard, or mosquito. On the whole, therefore, the motive was of a worldly nature, and any idea that may have existed in their minds concerning the efficacy of such offerings to abbreviate the weary stages of transition was certainly illogical to a degree, considering that they acknowledged no Superior Being, through whose interposition any such relaxation could possibly be effected.
Their doctrine pointed clearly to a prescribed course through which all must pass according to their deeds; even the very best—those ascetics who had been crowned with all the virtues inculcated in Buddhism—must be born again and again, though under far more favourable circumstances than those whose life had been careless and indifferent. The absolutely wicked would be born again in one of the many hells situated in the centre of the earth, coming up, perchance, in the form of petroleum, to be tortured in another form through those terrible periods, the limits of which were assigned at billions of years. Billions! Let those think of it whose religion teaches of an eternity: of the two, the latter, as being undefined and imaginary, is less perplexing to the mind, if equally impossible to grasp.