Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c7.s1.t3.32

c7.s1.t3.32

Tradition enables us to gain but a very imperfect idea of how the remaining notions, images, expressions, which passed to Buddhism as an inheritance from Brahmanical speculation, ranged themselves one after another round the central point of the religious thought, with which our sketch has been dealing. If we except the oldest, fundamental texts of the doctrine of the Âtman, from which we have drawn material for our sketch up to the present, we are driven to conjectures of the most uncertain kind, when we ask what works may be received as pre-Buddhist and what not. Internal evidence, on which alone we are thrown in this case, is sufficient in very few instances to render it possible to form even a probable estimate, as to whether what is connected in these texts in thought or form of expression with the Buddhist, belongs to the stages preparatory to the Buddhist phase of thought, or has on its part been influenced by that phase. I might claim a pre-Buddhist origin for the Kâthaka Upanishad, a poem which in the rude grandeur of its composition reflects all the earnestness and all the singularity of that age of self-study. If I am correct in my surmise as to the time of the production of this Upanishad, it contains an important contribution to the history of thought preparatory to Buddhist thought: namely, we here find the Satan of the Buddhist world, Mâra, the Tempter, the demon death-foe of the deliverer, in the form of Mrityu, the God of Death. The identity of the conception is most unmistakably apparent notwithstanding the difference of the clothing, and indeed the Brahmanical poem has preserved that image, which it has in common with the Buddhist legends, in a form assuredly far more original.