The Religions of India c19.105

c19.105

The monks' lives were simple. They went out by day to beg, were locked in their cells at night (Mahāv. i. 53), were probated for light offences, and expelled for very severe ones.¹ The people are represented as murmuring against the practices of the monks at first, till the latter were brought to more modest behavior. It is perhaps only Buddhist animosity that makes the narrator say: "They did not behave modestly at table. . . . Then the people murmured and said, 'These Buddhist monks make a riot at their meals, they act just like the Brahman priests.'" (Mahāv. i. 25; cf. i. 70.)