Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c6.s2.19

c6.s2.19

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.