Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c7.s1.26

c7.s1.26

Strictly speaking, therefore, the way seems closed to independence of thought, and authority dominates the field. Needless to say, the Buddhists were as little willing as other Churchmen to permit their thought to remain in effective bondage, and diverse methods of circumvention were available. Granted that, strictly speaking, the word of the Buddha must be found in the Sūtra and the Vinaya and be in accord with the law or norm, it is possible to extend its comprehension. A good word may be defined as possessing four characteristics;⁶ it is well said, conforms to salvation, pleasant and true as opposed to the opposites of these, and such a word by its intrinsic merit may be assumed to be spoken by the Buddha, despite the fact that no text containing it is available. Hence we read¹ that anything that is well said is a word of the Buddha, and its characteristics are given as four; it refers to truth, not to untruth; to the law, not to the non-law; it lessens sin, not increases it; it shows the advantages of Nirvāṇa, and does not indicate those of continued rebirth. The change of view is characteristic; originally the word of the Buddha was the norm, and hell the fate of him who, when the lion voice uttered its decrees, had the temerity to disbelieve the Buddha’s superhuman knowledge, and to think that his norm was founded on dialectic, accompanied by reasoning or experience, made of individual intuition.² The new attitude does not contradict the old; the word of the Buddha remains authoritative, but we are entitled to treat as the word of the Buddha every teaching which conforms to the essential characteristics of his teaching. The logic is sound enough; granted that the Buddha’s word has the extraordinary virtue of leading to salvation, and that this is a unique quality, it does follow that, if we can ascertain the characteristics of his utterances, such other sayings as possess these characteristics must be his, though not contained in the canonical records. Obviously these records neither are, nor pretend to be, complete accounts of all the declarations of a generation of active instruction to very diverse audiences. Again, we must allow for the fact that the Buddha even in the Suttas shows a clear willingness to accommodate his views to the opinions of his interlocutors; he is the physician, whose aim is to heal, and who, accordingly, is most anxious to find the best means of effecting this result, and does not concentrate his attention on the precise and absolute value of the means in themselves, a conception which later in the Mahāyāna appears in full development in the doctrine of the two forms of truth.³