Pre-Buddhist India: A Political, Administrative, Economic, Social and Geographical Survey of Ancient India Based Mainly on the Jataka Stories c6.s3.24

c6.s3.24

³ Speaking on the literature of the Buddhist period in general, Rhys Davids remarks : "It shows a curious contrast between the value of the ideas to be expressed and the child-like incapacity to express them well. We have here, as to style, only the untrained adolescence of the Indian mind. But what vigour it has!.... there is much rough and rugged beauty both in the ballads and in the lyrics.... In aftertimes we have evidence of more successful study of the arts and methods of rhetoric and poetry. But never do we find the same virility, the same curious compound of humour and irony and love of Nature on the one hand, with a deadly earnestness and really on the whole a surprisingly able grasp of the deepest problems of life, on the other :" Buddhist India, p. 186.