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Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c6: Chapter I. The Personality and Doctrines of the Buddha

Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c6

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English

Contents

Chapter I. The Personality and Doctrines of the Buddha

1. The Problem and the Sources

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THE most attractive and influential expositions of Buddhism in England and Germany present us with a simple and effective picture of an Indian sage, who spent a blameless life in the years 563 to 483 B. C. engaged in the development of a remarkably sane and modern ethical doctrine. This sage turned aside from idle metaphysical speculations; if he held views on such topics, he deemed them valueless for the purpose of salvation, which was his goal as it was that of his contemporaries, and declined to discuss these issues generally. But he had emancipated himself from the theory of the existence of any permanent entity in the nature of a soul, such as it was understood by his contemporaries; he had abandoned an ego-centric position, and found greater truth in the conception of constant change under a law of causality, thereby effecting a Copernican revolution in the tendency of philosophical thought. This realization of the unreality of the self led him to a wise and reasonable ethical system; the end of man, Nirvāṇa, consists not in strivings, inevitably painful, for the sake of a self which has no real existence, but in the eradication of passion of every kind, which brings man to supreme bliss, attainable and attained only on this earth, a view free from the delusion of a life of perpetual happiness after death.

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This portrait of an early rationalist, introducing the blessings of common sense into a world which knew nothing better than the mysticism of the Upaniṣads, or something still more crude, is unquestionably fascinating. ‘Surely a notable milestone in the history of human ideas,’ an enthusiast¹ has said, ‘that a man reckoned for ages by thousands as the Light not of Asia only but of the World,² and the saviour from sin and misery, should call this little formula [the doctrine of the chain of causation] his Norm or Gospel, or at least one aspect of that Gospel.’ The exponents of this view are far too well informed to ignore the difficulties in their theory, above all the perplexing fact that a rationalist should have assumed as self-evident the reality of a process of transmigration not less real because it is not the transmigration of an ordinary soul; but their faith can remove mountains, and there are diverse ways of escape. The Buddha could not disregard the ordinary terminology of his time³; his teaching had to be expressed in the terms of his day, and accommodated for practical purposes to ordinary intelligences; the new wine had to be poured into old bottles. Or again, when the crudities of the Buddha’s views become painful to modern rationalism, recourse may be had to the subtle irony⁴ which distinguishes Buddhist utterances and presents a key which, skilfully turned, is fitted to open any locked door of Buddhist doctrine. Or, more frankly, we may accept the view that the Buddha himself was a true rationalist, and absolutely declined to accept the dogma of transmigration, conscious that to do so would be to stultify, as in fact it does, his teaching and reduce his followers to painful intellectual straits. Further, we must admit, however reluctantly, that the masses of Asia, who have seen in the Buddha the Light of the World, have not done so because of his rationalist doctrines, his chain of causation, which they have understood as little as do we, or even his wise advice to still passion. They have adored him, because they have regarded him as the God of Gods, and believed that by devotion to him they shall attain eternal salvation, consisting of perpetual bliss. It is necessary, then, for believers in a primitive rationalism to admit that in some manner the simple humanity of the wise teacher has been overlaid by a divinity not his own, one moreover which on his own theory he would have treated as wholly absurd. This is a remarkable fate for a rationalist, and it is idle to claim it as plausible by quoting the case of Kṛṣṇa. There is not the slightest ground beyond conjecture for the belief that the character of Kṛṣṇa developed from a devout teacher mentioned once in the Upaniṣads to the interesting and popular divinity familiar to India. Supporters of this view rely on the parallel of the Buddha, and in both cases the contention is one which must be established, if at all, on its own merits without the insecure support of the other. In Kṛṣṇa’s case every consideration of probability points to the view that he was a tribal god who gradually attained the rank of a universal deity¹; but the modes of attaining divinity are diverse, and the case of the Buddha should be discussed in the light of the evidence of the relevant texts and not on the basis of dubious and uncertain analogies.

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¹ Mrs. Rhys Davids, Buddhism, p. 89. A true Buddhist (Aung, Compendium, pp. 283-5) follows authority, not reason.

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² But see Poussin, Nirvāṇa, p. 168.

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³ Cf. Mrs. Rhys Davids, Budd. Psych., p. 21; JRAS. 1903, p. 590; Compendium, p. 278.

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⁴ Rhys Davids, SBB. ii. 33, 160, 163; cf. Poussin, JA. 1902, ii. 250.

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¹ See Keith, *Indian Mythology*, pp. 123 ff., 187 ff.

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Now it is admitted that the evidence for the rationalistic theory of the Buddha depends on the texts of the Pali Canon of the school of the Vibhajyavādins, undoubtedly the most precious record of Buddhism preserved to us. The pious respect attributed to the antiquity and authority of these texts by devout Buddhists is as natural as it is laudable. But it is strange to find that western criticism, ruthless in probing the claims of its own sacred scriptures, has treated the Pali Canon with a respect so profound as to regard with open hostility² any attempt to apply to these sources of information the same dispassionate scrutiny which is demanded from the researcher into the history of Christianity. The problem, it must be realized, is not whether, given the texts and the orthodox tradition regarding their origin and authenticity, it is possible, by a liberal use of constructive imagination, to make the tradition harmonize more or less tolerably with the obvious facts revealed in the texts themselves. The issue is whether the texts, fairly interpreted, yield a result compatible with the traditional account of their origin and date. Nor is it legitimate in such an examination to adopt the view that what can be shown to be possible really happened. Nothing is more fallacious than the belief which transforms what is conceivable into what is actual. We must accept the limitations which the state of our sources often imposes upon us, and be content, when we have attained a position in which decision is impossible, to recognize that this and nothing else is the legitimate and scientific conclusion to be recorded.

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² Winternitz, *Ind. Litt.* ii. 357 ff. Walleser’s views (PGAB., pp. 15 ff.) are gravely affected by his erroneous identification of the Pali and Northern Abhidharma texts.

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Faith, it would seem clear on normal principles of interpretation, is decisively out of place in Buddhist traditions of the origin of their scriptures, when it is realized that the primary source, the Cullavagga, XI and XII, a chapter appended to the Vinaya Piṭaka, gives an account which is frankly incredible.¹ We are asked to believe that the Vinaya and the Dhamma were rehearsed in a Council held immediately after the death of the Buddha, when in the Dhamma, i. e. the Sutta Piṭaka, itself appear references to a date posterior to the Buddha's death, and the Vinaya can be analysed into sets of rules, an ancient commentary upon them, and a further careful elaboration based on the rules and the comment. If our faith in tradition is thus shattered at the outset, it becomes hard to ask us to accept as valid the legend of a second Council held a hundred years later at Vaiçālī, which condemned ten errors of discipline of the Vajjian monks and at which, the Cullavagga tells us, the Vinaya was once again recited. The Sinhalese sources, beginning with the Dīpavaṃsa (c. A. D. 400),² show their inferior value by further embroidering the story; the excommunicated Vajjiputtakas hold another great concourse of their own, while at the Council of the orthodox both the Dhamma and the Vinaya are recited. When the northern sources are compared, the confusion and obscurity deepen, and it is impossible, with any regard to the value of evidence, to come to any conclusion whatever regarding it, which can claim to be more than a mere hypothesis. Yet upon belief both in the fact of the Council and of its date—say not later than 377 B. C.—is based the leading argument for the date of the Vinaya Piṭaka. That text, it is urged, must have been completed before the condemnation of the ten points at the Council, or these points would have been disposed of, directly or indirectly in the text, and not left to the Cullavagga. The argument, however, breaks down hopelessly in view of the facts; the tenth of the breaches of discipline, the acceptance of gold and silver, is clearly condemned in the Vinaya, and the majority, if not all, of the other matters can be shown to be condemned more or less clearly in that text. It may, indeed, as legitimately be concluded that the compilers of the Vinaya, as we have it, were aware of the errors in question and took trouble to secure that they were not left unprovided against. At any rate a purely negative conclusion is alone possible.

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¹ See Minayeff, *Recherches sur le Bouddhisme*, chs. ii. and iii; Kern, *Ind. Buddh.*, pp. 101 ff.; Franke, JPTS. 1908, pp. 1 ff.; Poussin, IA. xxxvii. 2 ff.; *contra* Oldenberg, VP., pp. xxv ff.; ZDMG. lii. 613 ff.; cf. Smith, JRAS. 1901, pp. 843 ff.; Barth, RHR. xlii. 74 ff. See also Franke, DN., pp. xlii. ff.

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² Cf. Franke, VOJ. xxi. 203 ff.; Smith, IA. xxxii. 265 ff.

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The evidence for an early date of the Sutta Piṭaka is still less satisfactory. Reliance is specially placed by supporters of an early date on the Bhābrū edict of Asoka, in which he recommends seven passages or topics of the law for the study of his co-religionists. Ingenuity has identified all seven with certain passages of the Sutta Piṭaka, but there is a lamentable lack of unity in these identifications, as was only to be expected when terms so vague as all but one of the names are concerned.¹ Even in that case, the instruction of Rāhula on falsehood, it is absurd to claim that Asoka knew the text as we have it in the Majjhima Nikāya. All that we do know from this passage of Asoka’s records, as from their general tone and expression, is that Buddhist texts were already in existence, probably of the type preserved in the Sutta Piṭaka, and proof of such a fact is hardly necessary. Yet these conflicting identifications are still apparently taken as serious evidence that the Sutta Piṭaka had come into existence, such as we have it, before Asoka’s date.

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¹ Winternitz, Ind. Litt. ii. 13; D. Kosambi, IA. xli. 37 ff.; Smith, Asoka 3 p. 157; JRAS. 1915, p. 805; IA. xlviii. 8 ff.

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This conclusion is strengthened, in the opinion of those who hold it, by the tradition, not recorded until the fifth century A.D. in the commentators Dhammapāla and Buddhaghosa, that the Kathāvatthu in the Abhidhamma Piṭaka was composed by Tissa, son of Moggalī, at the court of Asoka at Pāṭaliputra in the middle of the third century B.C.¹ As such a tradition contradicts the view, asserted then to be current, that all the Canon was held to be the work of the Buddha, it is urged that the tradition must have been of overwhelming weight so as to overcome the scruples of the commentators. But the commentators escape the difficulty by accepting the authorship of the Buddha and ascribing a subordinate rôle to Tissa, and it is a delusion to imagine that their mention of that sage must have been based on tradition. For he is part and parcel of the Third Buddhist Council held, according to the Ceylonese tradition, under Asoka, approximately in 247 B.C., and of that Council, at which the Abhidhamma Piṭaka took final shape according to the same authorities, we have no other information. It is incredible that it ever took place without receiving some mention in the numerous records of Asoka; the efforts of those² who try to find a place in Asoka’s reign for the Council at such a time as to explain his silence are mistaken attempts to justify a tradition, the antiquity of which is wholly uncertain, but which is first recorded six centuries after the event whose happening it asserts. The desire to save the credibility of the Council has indeed led Mr. Vincent Smith to a paradox; he admits candidly that the Ceylonese date, sixteen or eighteen years after the consecration of Asoka, must be erroneous, since, if it had then met, it must have been recorded in the seventh Pillar Edict which reviews all the internal measures taken up to that date by the sovereign for the promotion of the law of piety. He admits further that any attempt to reconstruct a narrative of the actual proceedings of the Council is hopeless, in view of the conflict of traditions, and he recognizes³ that the Council of Vaiçālī is a figment. Yet, in face of these facts, he throws over the Ceylonese date in an effort to preserve the Council. Unless Asoka’s Council is formally revealed to us by an inscription yet to be discovered, the only verdict of scientific history must be that the Council was a figment of the pious or fraudulent imaginings of a sect, which desired to secure for its texts, and especially for the new Abhidhamma, a connexion with the greatest of Buddhist sovereigns, and that the northern tradition does well to ignore the Council entirely. Tissa himself, son of Moggali, bears a suspicious aspect¹; his name seems to be reminiscent of Upatissa, alias Sāriputta, and Moggallāna, the dearly beloved disciples of the Buddha, and independent authority for his existence there is absolutely none. His legend may be founded on the existence of some teacher of eminence in Asoka’s time; a Moggaliputta is mentioned on a Stūpa at Sānchi,² a fact which absurdly has been hailed as evidence of the historical existence and activity of Tissa. Equally absurd is his identification³ with the Upagupta of the northern tradition, for we have copious information regarding that sage and not a word of the alleged Council, so that we are asked to assume that the northern legends preserved faithfully his reputation, but omitted the most important happening of his life.

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¹ Mrs. Rhys Davids, Points of Controversy, pp. xxx ff. Contrast Poussin, Bouddhisme (1898), p. 56, n. 4.

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² Smith, op. cit., pp. 55, 217; but see Fleet, JRAS. 1910, p. 426.

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³ JRAS. 1901, pp. 843 ff. Geiger's defence of the Ceylonese records (ZDMG. lxiii. 540 ff.) is ineffective; see Franke, DN., pp. xliv. ff. There is

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¹ Kern, *Buddh.*, ii. 352 : Walleser, PGAB., pp. 23 f. To Sāriputta, be it noted, tradition ascribes nos. 33 and 34 of the *Dīgha*, which are in effect Abhidhamma texts; see SBB. iv. 198 ff.

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² Marshall, *Guide to Sānchi*, p. 137.

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³ Waddell, Proc. ASB. 1899, p. 70. See Barth, RHR. xlii. 73.

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Nothing more definite can be learned from the *Milindapañha*, on which, however, much stress has been been laid in support of the antiquity of the Tripiṭaka, on the score that practically the whole of the Piṭakas were known and regarded as a final authority when the work was produced, that is in the north-west of India about the time of the Christian era. The fatal defect of this argument,⁴ which its author has unhappily still overlooked, is that the quotations from the Piṭakas which establish his thesis are confined to Books IV to VII and to passages in the earlier books which are not the slightest evidence that they ever rested on any ancient tradition and they abound in admitted absurdities.

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⁴ SBB. II. ix, x.; still maintained in SBB. IV. vii. ff., despite the new facts.

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patent additions¹ much later than the main body of the text; the date even of the latter is uncertain, and may be considerably later than the Christian era.

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¹ Winternitz, *Ind. Litt.* ii. 140, 146.

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We come to firmer ground when we find in the inscriptions at Sāñchi² the terms *dhammakathika*, ‘preacher of the Law’, *sutātikini*, ‘one who knows a Suttanta’, *peṭaki*, ‘one who knows a Piṭaka’, and, most important of all, *pacanekāyika*, ‘one who knows the five Nikāyas’. The term *peṭaki* is dubious in sense; it might mean ‘one who knows the Piṭakas’, whether two or more, but it is more probable that only one Piṭaka is meant, and that in this period that name, unknown to the Canon, was applied to the five Nikāyas, as indeed it is certainly applied in the work *Peṭakopadesa*, while Suttanta was specifically applicable to the dialogues. The date of these records, therefore, becomes of real importance; it may conceivably be the second century B. C., but it is quite possible that it should be placed a century later.³ We have, therefore, moderately secure ground for thinking that in the two centuries after Asoka the *Sutta Piṭaka* of the Pali Canon was coming into being, and in the same period we may place the redaction of the *Vinaya Piṭaka*, in the composite form in which we have it, thus avoiding the absurdity of supposing that Asoka knew these great collections and yet managed to avoid ever mentioning them. It is needless to say that there is nothing in Indian history to make us doubt this result; if Asoka’s empire was brief in duration, Buddhism went on developing and flourishing, receiving, it is clear, patronage from the Greek and Çaka invaders until it received once more imperial patronage from the Kuṣāṇa Kaniṣka, probably at the close of the first century A. D. The date suggested is rather strengthened by the fact that under Kaniṣka there is evidence of literary activity in dealing with the scriptures of the Sarvāstivādin school, which may, therefore, have been coming into form much in the same period as the texts which we have in the Pali Canon.⁴

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² EI. ii. 93 f. ; ZDMG. xl. 58 f. ; IA. xxi. 225 ff. ; SBB. II. xii. f.

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³ The early dating of Waddell (JRAS. 1914, pp. 138 ff.) is incorrect ; cf. MASI. i. 14 f.

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⁴ Lévi, *T’Oung Pao*, 1907, pp. 114 ff. ; JRAS. 1910, pp. 1017 ff. ; JA. 1914, ii. 495.

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The evidence of the Chinese translations¹ as well as of the fragments in Sanskrit and various languages used in Central Asia,² which have been recently discovered, shows the existence of a series of texts, the *Dīrghāgama*, the *Madhyamāgama*, the *Saṃyuktāgama*, the *Ekottarāgama*, parallel with the four Pali Nikāyas, and of several texts, *Sthaviragāthā*, *Udāna*, *Dhammapada*, *Sūtranipāta*, *Vimānavastu*, *Buddhavaṃça*, which are found in the fifth Pali Nikāya. There is also conclusive evidence of strong similarity in the *Prātimokṣa* rules of the Vinaya, and we are justified in seeing the growth of a common tradition in India in the period immediately succeeding Asoka, which is preserved in varying purity in our texts.³

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¹ See Anesaki, *Trans. As. Soc. Japan*, xxxv. (1908.)

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² See references in Winternitz, *Ind. Litt.* ii. 186 f., 374; A. F. R. Hoernle, *Manuscript Remains of Buddhist Literature* (1916.)

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³ Cf. Lévi, *Les Saintes Écritures du Bouddhisme* (1909); JA. 1912, ii. 495 ff. Oldenberg, GN. 1912, pp. 197 ff. The relative priority of Vinaya and Sutta Pitakas is uncertain; cf. Kern, *Ind. Buddh.*, p. 2; Winternitz, *Ind. Litt.* ii. 17; Franke, JPTS. 1908, pp. 8 ff., 68 ff.; SBB. iii. 75 f.

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Within the Nikāyas themselves it is impossible to establish any very definite chronological strata. The division is artificial: into long texts, called Suttas in a terminology which differs from the use of Brahmanical texts; middle sized texts; texts united by subject matter—understood very vaguely; and texts grounded on a numerical basis in accordance with the regrettable practice of Buddhism, late and early, to form groups of ideas on the basis of number. There is some ground for treating this last Nikāya as younger than the other three⁴ but while the *Saṃyutta Nikāya* may be suspected of being late, it is impossible to assert⁵ that the *Dīgha* is as a whole the oldest source of our knowledge of Buddhism. What is clear from the enormous amount of common material, both verse and prose, is that the Nikāyas, as we have them, are redactions of floating material, in which old and new are commingled; it is unnecessary to go further and postulate one master mind for the redaction of each Nikāya⁶; the theory is open to the objection that it requires too much subjective judgement to discover the master mind, even measuring its mastery on the Buddhist standard of relevancy. The texts of the *Khuddaka Nikāya* still less admit of reference to any one period; they contain old matter and new, even within the limits of one and the same text. That we have in the *Udāna* or *Itivuttaka* the actual words of the Buddha is wholly implausible, and old as the *Suttanipāta* is reckoned, we find already the Buddha surrounded with an elaborate mythology. The *Jātaka* book is a strange conglomerate of old and new verses with new prose; some of its tales, as we know from Buddhist sculpture and a stray citation or two, go back to the Asokan epoch or shortly after; as folk-lore its contents are often of undeniable age, but as Buddhist fables their antiquity is uncertain.

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⁴ Winternitz, *Ind. Litt.* ii. 50, 365.

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⁵ Franke, ZDMG. lxix. 455.

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⁶ Franke, ZDMG. lxviii. 473 ff.; VOJ. xxix. 134 ff. for the *Majjhima*; *Festschrift Windisch*, pp. 196 ff. on the *Suttanipāta*; DN., pp. iv. ff.

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The case of the *Abhidhamma Piṭaka* is far worse than that of the *Sutta* and *Vinaya Piṭakas*. These two texts know nothing of such a Piṭaka; the division recognized is that of Dhamma, i. e. Sutta, and Vinaya with Mātikā, ‘lists’ as the third, the germ, doubtless, of the actual Abhidhamma.¹ None the less the most grandiose claims have been advanced for the Abhidhamma books. Mrs. Rhys Davids² claims that the *Dhammasaṅgaṇi* is to be dated about 385 B. c., basing the assertion on the internal evidence of form and content as compared with the *Kathāvatthu* (247 B. c.). Professor Walleser³ denies the validity of the argument, but resorts to the view that the *Dhammasaṅgaṇi* is the *Dharmasaṃgraha* of Ṣāriputra among the northern Abhidhamma texts, and is referred to by Asoka as the Upatisa-pasine, Upatissa being the other name of Sāriputta; the suggestion is impossible of credit, and it is certain that the *Dharmasaṃgraha* is wholly different from the *Dhammasaṅgaṇi*. A useful antidote to these extravagant estimates is afforded by Professor Rhys Davids⁴ who places the four Nikāyas at the period assigned to the *Dhammasaṅgaṇi* and brings that text down later than the late texts of the *Khuddaka Nikāya*. He himself,⁵ however, asserts that in the subjects of which it treats and its style the *Kathāvatthu*, the latest text of the Piṭaka, accords perfectly with all we know or expect of Asokan India, but the assertion is idle and is unsupported by any evidence.

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On the contrary the work shows the clearest signs, as Mrs. Rhys Davids' candidly allows, of much addition, which has deprived it of coherence or order. The admission is necessary in view of the obvious confusion of the work, and it deprives of all point the only serious attack made on Minayeff's criticism of the traditional origin of the Kathāvatthu; the inclusion in the text of a heresy known to have been held by the Vetulyakas in the second century A. D. in Ceylon and later does not prove that the work was only begun then, but it indicates that in all probability it was still open to additions in the second century A. D. and later. Moreover the theory that it is the latest of the Abhidhamma books is without foundation; it ignores three of them, Dhātukathā, Puggalapaññatti, and Yamaka. The scholastic character of these works suggests that they are divided by no small space from the other Piṭakas, and are very possibly younger than the older portion of the Milindapañha,² which refers to the Abhidhamma only in passages certainly late. The lateness of the Abhidhamma is confirmed also by the Ceylonese tradition itself. When it tells of the Great Council held by the heretical Vajjiputtakas, it says that they rejected the Abhidhamma books, along with the Paṭisambhidā and the Niddesa and portions of the Jātaka from the fifth Nikāya, and the Parivāra appendix of the Vinaya.

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Now it is not disputed that the Paṭisambhidā and Niddesa, which are really commentaries or Abhidhamma, are late, that the Jātaka is full of late matter, and that the Parivāra is not original; we are confirmed, therefore, in the view that the Abhidhamma has no claim to the antiquity asserted for it. This is supported by the undeniable fact that, while the Sutta and Vinaya Piṭakas have parallels in other schools, based on a common tradition, the Abhidharma of the Sarvāstivādins, of which we now have information,³ utterly disagrees with the Pali Abhidhamma. As this Abhidhamma existed at the time of the Council of Kaniṣka, it is doubtless to it and not to the Pali Abhidhamma that we have to refer the term Trepiṭaka,⁴ which appears in an inscription of this time, and we are left to conjecture a date for the Pali Abhidhamma. All that can be said is that in the third century A. D. the Abhidhamma Piṭaka seems to have been studied in Ceylon,¹ and that in the commentators of the fifth century we find the Abhidhamma Piṭaka treated as authoritative, as also in the late additions to the Milindapañha. But we are without means of judging precisely at what date the old Mātikās were formed into our present texts, possibly after the Christian era.

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¹ Geiger, PD., pp. 118 f.

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² *Psych. Ethics*, pp. xviii. f.

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³ PGAB., pp. 20 ff.

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⁴ CHI. i. 197.

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⁵ SBB. II. xi.; CHI. i. 194.

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¹ Points of Controversy, p. xxxi; cf. Poussin, ERE. iv. 184.

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² Barth, RHR. xlii. 73.

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³ Takakusu, JPTS. 1904-5, pp. 67 ff. A Dharmagupta Abhidharma also existed. JA. 1916, ii. 20, 38.

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⁴ EI. viii. 176. It is important to note that DN. no. 33, Saṅgīti Suttanta, is

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¹ Hardy, Eastern Monachism, p. 156.

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The place of the production of the Pali Canon is uncertain; it comes to us as that of the Vibhajjavādin school of the Mahāvihāra of Ceylon; and its connexion with Ceylon is recognized in Sanskrit texts. But that is not to say that the Pali Canon was redacted in Ceylon; we need credit the Ceylonese tradition of the early conversion of the people to Buddhism as little as we do any other part of its legends. We may, therefore, treat the Canon as the work of an Indian school, and note the Ceylonese tradition recording its reduction to writing² under Abhaya Vaṭṭagāmani, perhaps at the close of the first century B. C., as perhaps applicable to the two older Piṭakas, though not necessarily in their present form in detail; certainly not in the case of the Jātaka book. It is a different question whether the Abhidhamma Piṭaka was a product of Ceylon; there is nothing to prove its northern origin, and accordingly the matter must remain open, in view of our almost total ignorance of the facts on which a conclusion of value could be framed.

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² This record is not favourable to the theory that Piṭaka means box for MSS. (Bühler, Ind. Alph., pp. 86 ff.) Cf. SBE. xxxv. 28, n. 1.

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Part of this ignorance arises from the uncertainty of the origin of Pali, the language of the Canon. One fatal objection to the orthodox theory, and to the attempts of recent authorities to defend it, is the fact that the language of the Canon is plainly and undeniably a post Asokan literary dialect, assuming much communication between the learned monks of different parts of India.³ Even if we

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³ See Lévi, JA. 1912, ii. 495 ff. (Geiger's reply (Pāli, pp. 1 ff.) is ineffective.)

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parallel with the Saṃgītiparyāya of the Sarvāstivādins; this suggests that it was the Sarvāstivādin example which induced the Vibhajjavādins to develop a separate Abhidharma. For other Abhidhamma matter in the Sutta Piṭaka see MN. i. 299 ff.

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assumed that the Canon was established by Asoka, we would have to admit that it has been radically altered in form, and it would be absurd to claim that the alteration in form had taken place without change of substance. The complexity and artificiality of the language as it stands are shown by the extraordinary diversity of the suggestions as to the vernacular which must lie at the basis of Pali. Oldenberg¹ found it in the region south of the Deccan; Rhys Davids,² on historical grounds, in Avanti; Franke,³ on linguistic considerations, in the tract whose centre was Ujjayinī; while Grierson,⁴ accepting Windisch’s contention in favour of the Indian tradition which makes Māgadhī the basis of Pali, finds that Pali is the literary form of the Māgadhī language, the then Koine of India, as it was spoken and as it was used as a medium of literary instruction in the Takṣaśilā University, the vernacular of Takṣaśilā being Paiśācī Prakrit, whose home he places in the north-west though Konow⁵ locates it about the Vindhya region; or again it is held that Ardha-Māgadhī underlies our Pali texts. The obvious deduction is that Pali came into being, such as we have it, by a slow and complex process occupying some centuries, and variations of place.

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¹ VP., p. liv.

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² CHI. i. 187; cf. Buddhist India, pp. 140 ff.

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³ Pāli und Sanskrit, p. 138.

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⁴ Bhandarkar Commem. Essays, pp. 117 ff.; Windisch, Actes du XIVe Congrès International des Orientalistes, i. 277. But see SBA. 1913, pp. 1003 ff.

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⁵ ZDMG. lxiv. 114 ff. Paiśācī is attributed to the Sthaviras by Wassilieff, Bouddhisme, p. 268; cf. Lacôte, Bṛhatkathā p. 44.

2. The Conclusions attainable

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If we adopt, as we must if not precluded by obligations of faith, the conclusion that the Pali Canon came into its present shape long after the death of the Buddha, the question presents itself whether any effective result can be achieved in selecting parts of the Canon as earlier and more authentic than others. The results attainable⁶ in this regard are from our point of view of negligible importance; the fifth Nikāya contains miscellaneous

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⁶ See references in Winternitz, Ind. Litt. ii. 51, 53, 365; Rhys Davids, Buddh. Ind., pp. 165 ff.

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Cf. Grammont, Mél. Lévi, pp. 65 ff. Rhys Davids (SBE. xxxvi. 269) suggests a Ceylonese origin of the Parivāra.

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matter, some old in part at least, like the Suttanipāta, Udāna, Thera- and Therī-gāthās, Dhammapada, and Itivuttaka, some new like the Peta and Vimāna-vatthu, the Buddhavansa, Apadāna, and Cariyāpiṭaka; the Abhidhamma is clearly a late and deliberate working over of the Dhamma in its technical aspect. But the bulk of the Sutta Piṭaka and the Vinaya Piṭaka represents the same stage of ideas; they may have been redacted contemporaneously, and any attempt to trace strata of diverse ages involves a determination on other grounds of what elements should be early and what should be late. On the theory of Buddhist rationalism, we can decide that all the supernatural element is secondary, but we are faced with the insistent question whether we have any right thus to proceed. Granted that a preacher of a gospel of pure reason may be deified by some accident, it is at least certain that it is much more easy to deify an inspired seer who deems himself to be an embodiment of the divine, and that India in particular has been specially prone to accept as real such embodiments. If we reason a priori, and lay aside our natural desire to modernize and to find reason prevailing in a barbarous age, we should rather expect to find that the Buddha was one who was indeed human, but who at the same time felt himself to be, and was regarded by his followers as, something far superior to humanity, a great divinity in the eyes of his followers, a deity even to those who were not of the chosen circle. The conclusion is doubtless embarrassing to rationalism, but, if we are content to seek historical truth, we must be prepared to shed our personal predilections and to accept the conclusion which evidence indicates. The case for this view is greatly strengthened by the nature of the texts of the Pali Canon. The Vibhajyavādins were plainly prepared to rationalize as far as practicable;¹ as opposed to other schools they minimize the supernatural element in Buddhism, and the salient fact is that even in the records of these would-be rationalists we find abundant proof that the orthodox and prevalent view of the Buddha made him far removed from ordinary humanity.

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¹ Cf. Barth, RHR. xlii. 57; Poussin, Bouddhisme, Études et Matériaux (1898), p. 42; Bouddhisme, pp. 216 ff; cf. ERE. i. 95.

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In the Mahāpadāna Suttanta¹ of the Dīgha Nikāya we have in the fullest and most categorical form the declaration of the transcendental character of the Buddha. He is no mere mortal reformer, but a sage whose divine insight enables him to pierce back to the ninety-first Aeon ago when the Buddha Vipassin came to earth to be followed in the thirty-first Aeon by Sikhin and Vessabhu, and in this Aeon by Kakusandha, Koṇāgamana,² and Kassapa, and finally by Gotama himself. Theirs is no mortal birth; they descend in full consciousness amid surpassing radiance throughout the universe into their mother's womb, in which they abide in happiness, completely visible to their mothers for ten months before birth. At birth gods receive them, streams of water fall to bathe them, they stride seven paces proclaiming their pre-eminence, the worlds are illuminated; their mothers bear them standing and without defilement, but die on the seventh day. The infants bear already the marvellous marks, thirty-two in number, which mark them out as Great Males, destined either to become Emperors of the World or Buddhas, the flat feet, the dustless skin, the long tongue, the mole between the eyebrows, and the turban-like protuberance on the head. Each passes through the same stages of worldly life, of enlightenment, of teaching and attainment of Nirvāṇa. No two Buddhas can coexist, and it is the privilege of the Buddha to extend his life to the full length of an Aeon; shame on Ānanda who in heedlessness failed to accept the hint repeatedly pressed upon him by Gotama, and to beg his master to exercise this power, instead of passing away at the age of eighty, like a mere man.³ Gotama's adversaries are much more than human; the legend of the varied temptations by Māra,⁴ the god of death or the desire which leads to death, is not to be explained away as metaphorical or the fruit of a poetic fancy; to the Buddha himself as to his followers we may easily believe the experience was as real as anything else in the world; does not our own age suffer from the puerilities of spiritualistic phenomena of far inferior order? The divine nature reveals itself again in the transfiguration of the Buddha’s colour on the night in which he attains supreme insight and on that on which he passes away, and in the earthquakes which mark the various stages in a Buddha’s career.¹ His powers include that of assuming diverse forms at pleasure; he can discourse to assemblies of nobles, Brahmins, householders, and wanderers and to the hosts of the Guardian Gods, the Thirty-Three Gods, of the Māras, and the Brahmās, and none of these can say who indeed he was.² The Buddha is the first of beings, lord and controller of the whole world and those that are within it, Māra, Brahmā, men and gods, ascetics and Brahmins.³ At his mere word the demon of the eclipse, Rāhu, slinks away, releasing the moon which had appealed to the Buddha for safety.⁴ The great voice of the Buddha penetrates countless universes, and he rebukes the graceless Udāyin when he mocks Ānanda for the awe which this peculiarity in the master inspired.⁵ The Milindapañha⁶ frankly styles him the sovereign god of gods (devātideva), and the Canon makes a simple Arhant above the gods (atidevapatta). Significant is the Buddha’s reply to the Brahmin Doṇa, who had viewed with amazement the thousand-spoked wheels which adorn the feet of the Blessed One. Questioned as to his identity he denies that he is god, or Gandharva or Yakṣa⁷ or man; like a lotus born in the water which rears its head above the water and is no longer defiled by the water, he has left the world and its defilements, and is a Buddha.⁸ Gotama in fact neither has the appearance of a man, nor will he admit that he is a man. If he dies, he does so voluntarily, laying aside the possibility of prolonging his life; miracles mark his death and his funeral, and his relics form forthwith the object of eager veneration.

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¹ Waddell's reading, Mahāpadhāna, i. e. Buddha as supreme being (JRAS. 1914, p. 674), is implausible.

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² His human reality is not proved by Asoka's reference. Smith, Asoka, p. 224.

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³ DN. ii. 115 ff.

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⁴ Windisch, Māra und Buddha; Burlingame, HOS. xxviii. 11 ff.

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¹ DN. ii. 134 (cf. SBB. iii. 223, n. 1); 109.

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² DN. ii. 109.

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³ AN. ii. 23; SN. i. 67.

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⁴ SN. i. 50.

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⁵ AN. i. 227 f.

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⁶ p. 381; SBE. xxxvi. 305, n. 1.

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⁷ He is so styled; MN. i. 386.

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⁸ AN. ii. 37; Kern, Ind. Buddh., p. 64.

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The evidence might be accumulated, but it is sufficient to remark that there is nothing to set against it; the Pali Canon contains no hint that even the greatest of Buddhist rationalists questioned the supernatural character of the Buddha. The intellectual standard of the milieu in which the Dīgha Nikāya was compiled is sufficiently proved by the admission into the Canon of the Pāṭika Suttanta, in which the Buddha appears as a magician of a trivial and vulgar kind.¹ The Mahāsudassana and Cakkavatti-sīhanāda Suttantas among others indicate how full the minds of the Buddhists were with the legend of the sun god, and the solar disk is the obvious source of the later doctrine of the wheel of the law or norm; the concept of the Great Male reminds us of Nārāyaṇa, who is identical, or identified, with Viṣṇu,² and, more distantly, of the primeval male by whose dismemberment in sacrifice the gods created the world.³ It is significant that the Jaṭilas, or fire-worshippers, were among those early converted, by the aid of a series of miracles of moderate interest;⁴ they had, it is clear, no fundamental difficulty in transferring their adoration to another form of divinity, but it is idle to suppose that they would have abandoned their faith for a cold rationalism. It was the age of the growth of the great gods, Çiva and Viṣṇu in their various forms,⁵ and the Buddha’s success was due to the fact that he either had claims to divinity, or his followers attributed it to him and won general acceptance for the view. It is conceivable that divinity was thrust upon him against his will, but every ground of probability supports the plain evidence of the texts that he himself had claims which necessarily conferred upon him a place as high as the rank of the greatest of gods. The Buddha treats Brahmā, regarded as the highest of the gods, and all the hosts of heaven, with a cool superciliousness which is explicable more easily on the ground of his conscious divinity than as an outcome of a rationalism, which certainly his disciples did not understand. Given the psychological conditions of the times, it would have been a miracle had the Buddha been capable of the rationalism imputed to him, and it is unhistorical to neglect the clear testimony of the Canon of the least supernaturalist of all the schools.

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¹ SBB. iv. 1 ff.

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² Hopkins, Epic Mythology, pp. 206, 208.

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³ RV. x. 90.

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⁴ MV. i. 15 ff. The Ājīvakas, once counted as adorers of Nārāyaṇa, cannot so be reckoned; Bhandarkar, IA. xli. 286 ff.

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⁵ The scant mention of either (Veṇhu in DN. ii. 259; SN. i. 52; Siva, i. 55) is no proof to the contrary.

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How far is it possible to ascribe to the Buddha the philosophical views which we find in the Sutta Piṭaka? The elaborations of the Abhidhamma are obviously not his, but the Suttas themselves are far from presenting a single coherent doctrine. They exhibit many streams of thought, here and there welded into a fairly effective whole, but sometimes merely put together roughly without serious attempt at harmonization. We realize that the Buddhist doctrine as we have it has passed through a long period of development,¹ and the Canon represents a compromise of contending views; the eight Jhānas, for instance, are compounded of two sets, diverse in origin and in moral tone.² Yet there are certain features of Buddhism which are so emphatically presented in the Sutta Piṭaka and later as to impress upon us the view that they represent the views of the great sage himself.³ He believed, we cannot doubt, in the reality of what the vulgar called metempsychosis, but which he transformed to suit another belief, the non-existence of a substantial permanent soul such as that accepted by the teachers of the Upaniṣads. He held, as did the thinkers of the Upaniṣads, a faith in the mysterious power of the act which automatically determined man's life from moment to moment, without divine intervention. He believed, much more decidedly than did the thinkers of the Upaniṣads, that life in whatever form was a striving which inevitably involved pain, but release from it he found, not in the realization of the unity of the self and the absolute, the doctrine of the Upaniṣads, but in the appreciation of the truth of pain, its causation, its cessation, and the means of attaining freedom from it. The path to this freedom lay neither in asceticism or in worldly striving, but in a middle way, involving self culture, the restraint of the passions, and the practice of intense meditation. On the positive content, if any, of the state attained by these means the master must have been silent, whatever his personal view; for the texts present us with abundant evidence to this effect and his reticence harmonizes well with the other assured fact that he declined himself to engage in, or permit to others, speculations on metaphysical questions, which did not tend directly to the welfare of the individual seeking truth. He was, we may be assured, dogmatic in his utterances; his insight enabled him, with the aid of his power to recollect the past, to explain the structure of reality to his disciples in such measure as was profitable for their salvation. Doubtless it was this consciousness of insight and memory which impressed on the Buddha himself and on his disciples the conception that he was far above humanity; this is the simple psychological explanation of a claim which seems more bizarre and unreal to the western world than it ever has seemed in India. The popular appeal of his teaching lay doubtless largely in this fact; the disciples were not compelled to change their mentality, but only to accept a new object of reverence, and to follow in some measure the dictates of a new creed, on the whole sane and free from the excess of asceticism which has always had attractions for Indian opinion. Hence we may explain the permanence of the fraternity which he founded, in comparison with the evanescence of most of the other groups, formed by teachers who, to judge from the Buddhist texts, made no claim whatever to more than normal humanity. It is characteristic of the Indian thought of the period that the other contemporary movement which succeeded in maintaining itself was Jainism, whose founder likewise had claims to supernatural nature.

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¹ Cf. Franke, ZDMG. lxiii. 1 ff.; lxix. 455 ff.; DN., pp. ix. ff.; VOJ. xxix. 134 ff.

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² See below, ch. vi, § 2.

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³ Poussin, Bouddhisme, ch. i; Beckh, Buddhismus, i. 100 ff.

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But, while we may accept these broad outlines as representing with approximate truth, on the strength of the available evidence, the teachings of the Buddha, it is clearly impossible with the materials at our disposal to develop in detail his position, or to consider how he strove to combine views, far from according, at least when closely probed. We can follow in many points the disputes of the schools, but it is impossible to say how far in each aspect they represent the opinions of the master. The point is important, when we recognize how late our texts really are, as contrasted with the view that they are authoritative for the century after Buddhism,¹ when they would probably represent the teachings of the Buddha himself.

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¹ So still Rhys Davids, CHI. i. 192 ff. On the illiteracy of early Buddhism, see Windisch, KF. pp. 2 ff.; Oldenberg, GGA. 1917, pp. 143 ff.

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Moreover, it must be added, that a certain doubt still exists, not indeed as to the historical existence of the Buddha,¹ but as to his date. The normally accepted date, placing his death in the decade 487-77 B. C., depends on a correction of the Sinhalese tradition, which strictly interpreted would give rather the date 544-3 B. C. for the Parinirvāṇa of the Blessed One.² A singularly unhappy attempt has, indeed, recently been made to resuscitate the traditional date, based on the absurd suggestion that there exist actual portrait statues of the Caiçunāga dynasty and an implausible interpretation of an inscription of Khāravela of Kaliṅga.³ But a more serious difficulty inevitably suggests itself; to what extent can we trust the tradition of the Pali Canon which makes the Buddha contemporaneous with Ajātasattu, apart from the question of the true date of that monarch? Is it not possible that the synchronism is fictitious, a view which would rid us of the unpleasant spectacle of the Buddha conversing amicably with a parricide? We have, of course in the Upaniṣads the name of Yājñavalkya associated with that of Janaka of Videha, and no one probably would care to insist on the contemporaneity. We have, moreover, some positive evidence of confusion in the records, for the history of Jainism renders it probable that Mahāvīra died in 468 B. C.,⁴ that is, after the death of the Buddha, while the Canon⁵ is absolutely clear in asserting that Mahāvīra died in the Buddha's lifetime. This is one of many inconsistencies and errors in the canonical statements,⁶ and there is thus justification for the doubt expressed by inquirers so different as Franke and de la Vallée Poussin as to the date of the Buddha, though the case against the traditional date is insufficient to justify its rejection out and out.⁷

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¹ Cf. Franke, ZDMG. lxix. 456; Poussin, *Bouddhisme*, p. 47, n. 2.

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² See e.g. Fleet, JRAS. 1912, pp. 239 ff. Rhys Davids (CHI. p. 172) shows prudent reserve.

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³ Jayaswal, JBORS. iv. 364 ff. ; v. 88 ff. ; see R. Chanda, IA. xlviii. 25 ff. ; 214 ff. ; R. C. Majumdar, ibid., 29 ff. ; 187 ff. ; K. S. Śankara Aiyar, IA. xlix. 43 ff.

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⁴ See Charpentier, IA. xli. 118 f., 125 f., 167 f. ; CHI. i. 156 ; Jacobi, SBE. XLV. xiii. ff.

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⁵ DN. iii. 117, 209 f. ; MN. ii. 243 f.

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⁶ Admitted even by so convinced a believer as Winternitz, *Ind. Litt.* ii. 360. Cf. Barth, RHR. xlii. 77 ; Franke, VOJ. xxiv. 1 ff. ; ZDMG. lxiii. 8 ff.

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⁷ The alleged relics of the Buddha in the Piprāhvā Stūpa and in a casket of Kaniṣka (see ref. in Franke, DN. p. 254, n. 2 ; JRAS. 1909, pp. 1056 ff.) do not help to establish either his date or reality, for the invention of relics is world-wide.

Linked texts (43)