Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c10.69

c10.69

they do not repel him. Though this unlimited possibility of recession may have brought evils in its train—it is admitted, that it has led to gross abuses in the present day*—yet its influence on the moral health of monastic life may be regarded as more beneficial than otherwise. Apart from the fact that the Order would have been wholly deficient in the external power to bind its members by forcible means of any kind whatever, nothing could have been more decidedly opposed to the nature of Buddhism than such constraint. Every man might go the way which the strength or the weakness of his nature, the merit or demerit of past existences led him : the doors of the Order stood open, but no impatient or pertinacious zeal pressed the reluctant to enter or impeded the return of the wayward to the world.