Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c7.s1.7

c7.s1.7

Hence the importance attached in the Canon to the decision of the Buddha, tardily arrived at, on the direct intercession of Brahmā himself, to make known his doctrine to the world instead of passing into Nirvāṇa, and leaving the world without a saviour. From the Buddha and his succession of disciples the essential knowledge comes;¹ the doctors of the school carry weight, not on their own merits, but because they expound the words of the Buddha; even in the later school of the Mahāyāna the doctrine persists: their greatest teacher Nāgārjuna² claims our respect because the Buddha, five centuries before, prophesied his advent and his ability to teach, and all that is true in our age can be traced to the utterances of the Buddha, as in other ages to the words of other Buddhas. It is in harmony with this that the later texts³ at any rate recognize that the individual Buddhas, who appear at the time when the law of the Buddha is not preached and the community is dissolved, obtain their knowledge, not by their own unaided intuition, but through recollection of the teaching of a Buddha heard by them in a previous birth when a Buddha was in existence.