Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c10.16

c10.16

The Order of Buddhists presents, as long as the Master is alive, a union of teacher and scholars after the Brahmanical model. The transition of such a community, so to speak, from a monarchical type to a republican, its passing somehow, when the teacher dies, into a confederacy of independent members existing side by side, is wholly unknown to the religious system of the Brahmans.‡ This very transition has completed itself in Buddhism. Buddha died, and his disciples, already at that time scattered over the greater part of India, survived as a monastic community, which had no visible head and saw its invisible head only in the doctrine and ordinance declared by Buddha.* “Be your own light, be your own refuge,” says Buddha, when approaching death, “have no other refuge. Let the truth be your light and your refuge; have no other refuge.” Thus became fixed, what has been described as the trinity of Buddhism, the triad of those sacred powers, in which the newly-entering monk or lay-brother by solemn declaration “takes his refuge:” Buddha, the Doctrine, the Order. Not without hesitation I here venture to hazard a conjecture, which has no support and can have none in tradition: I think that the formula of this sacred triad does not go back to the time of Buddha’s life, but that it had its origin in connection with those very changes which his death wrought for the community of his disciples. Must not Buddha alone, as long as he lived, and the Doctrine of deliverance preached by him have appeared to the believers their refuge? Could anyone call the disciples his refuge, as long as the Master was with them? His death changed everything. Now the Order stood as the sole visible exponent of the idea hitherto embodied in Buddha, as the sole possessor of delivering truth; now he