Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8.16

c8.16

And this master is not regarded as a wise man of the dim past, but people think of him as of a man, who has lived in a not very remote past. A century is said to have passed from his death to the council of the seven hundred fathers at Vesâlî (about 380 B.C.), and it may be taken as a fact that the great bulk of the holy texts, in which from beginning to end his person and his doctrine are the central points, in which his life and his death are spoken of, had been already compiled before this council of the Church assembled: the oldest components of these texts, such as the liturgy of the confession to which we have referred, belong in all probability much rather to the beginning than to the end of this first century after Buddha's death. The period, therefore, which separates the deponent witnesses from the events to which they undertake to depose, is short enough: it is not much longer, probably not at all longer, than the period which elapsed between the death of Jesus and the compilation of our gospels. Is it credible that during the lapse of such a time in the Church of Buddha, all genuine memory of his life could be extruded by ballads of the sun-god, transferred to his personality?—crushed out in a brotherhood of ascetics, in whose circle of ideas, according to the evidence of the literature which they have bequeathed to us, everything else possessed a higher value than these very ballads of nature?