The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c6.s1.11

c6.s1.11

similarly served the needs of the Buddhist preaching. They will perhaps seem to you only moderately amusing : but in India morality must always have its turn. In them the Bodhisattva is constantly reborn in the state of man, that state so difficult to attain, we are told, which, while the one most favourable of all to the acquisition of merits, is also the only one in which the candidate for the Bodhi ever has a chance of attaining his object. Each time this marvellous being, whatever may be his caste, astonishes us with the proofs of his skill, wisdom and disinterestedness : but it is especially in his royal births that he gives free course to his virtue. Let us not forget that the Buddhists professed to place the class of the Kshatriya, or, as we should say, the nobility of the sword, to which their Master belonged, above that of the Brahmans : naturally, we shall have to follow the order established by them in the hierarchy of the castes.