Hinduism and Buddhism: An Historical Sketch v1.c19.27

v1.c19.27

The fifth or Khuddaka-Nikâya is perhaps the portion of the Pali scriptures which has found most favour with Europeans, for the treatises composing it are short and some of them of remarkable beauty. They are in great part composed of verses, sometimes disconnected couplets, sometimes short poems. The stanzas are only imperfectly intelligible without an explanation of the occasion to which they refer. This is generally forthcoming, but is sometimes a part of the accepted text and sometimes regarded as merely a commentary. To this division of the Pitaka belong the Dhammapada, a justly celebrated anthology of devotional verses, and the Sutta-Nipâta, a very ancient collection of suttas chiefly in metre. Other important works included in it are the Thera and Therî-gâthâ or poems written by monks and nuns respectively, and the Jâtaka or stories about the Buddha’s previous births². Some of the rather miscellaneous contents of this Nikâya are late and do not belong to the same epoch of thought as the discourses attributed to Gotama. Such are the Buddha-vaṃsa, or lives of Gotama and his twenty-four predecessors, the Cariyâ-Piṭaka, a selection of Jâtaka stories about Gotama’s previous births and the Vimâna and Peta-vatthus, accounts of celestial mansions and of the distressful existence led by those who are condemned to be ghosts¹.