Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8.10

c8.10

One cannot read the ingenious efforts of Senart without admiring the energy with which the French scholar constrains the Veda as well as the Indian epic, the literature of the Greeks as well as that of northern races—no small constraint was here necessary—to bear witness for his solar Buddha. But one is astonished that this so extensive reading has not availed itself, when dealing with the legends of Buddha, of one field, which would have presented not less important sources of information than the Homeric hymns and the Edda: the oldest available literature of Buddhism itself, the oldest declarations of the body of Buddha's disciples regarding the personality of their master. Senart bases his criticism almost wholly on the legendary biography, the "Lalita-Vistara," current among the northern Buddhists in Tibet, China and Naipal. But would it be allowable for any one, who undertook to write a criticism on the life of Christ, to set aside the New Testament, and follow solely the apocryphal gospels or any legendary works whatsoever of the Middle Ages? Or does the law of criticism, which requires us to trace back tradition to its oldest form, before forming an opinion on it, not deserve to be as closely observed in the case of Buddhism as in that of Christianity?