Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8.191

c8.191

∗ It is a natural supposition that Buddha directed his first ministration to his quondam associates and admirers, in whom he could hope most surely to find willing hearers. Criticism has no means of determining absolutely, whether we are here to in the internal probabilities of the case, a mark of genuineness, or of fiction. But, in my opinion, it is *à priori* probable that the recollection of where and to whom Buddha's first discourse, or at any rate his first successful discourse, was delivered, had not been lost. That some preceding unsuccessful attempts on Buddha's part to gain adherents, have been passed over in silence by tradition, is quite possible; but Mons. L. Feer's attempts ("Études Bouddhiques," i, p. 1-37) to point out traces of such events in the tradition, seem to me unsuccessful; the nature of these traditions does not admit of calculating from Buddha's proceedings any such pragmatic consecutive order of things, as this scholar has sought to make out therefrom, not without some violence towards the tradition in many places. If we follow the victorious march of Buddha, as we find it described in the "Mahâvagga," i, 1-24, on the map, there is not much to be said against the itinerarium: this to-and-fro movement is quite in accordance with the customs of these pious wanderers. When we call to mind the sharply defined analogy, which the imagination of the Buddhists traces between the victorious career of their master and the victorious progress of a world-subduing king, we can scarcely avoid opining that the former, if pure invention had here had full swing, would have been constructed according to the standing geographical scheme of the latter (vide "Lalita Vistara," p. 16, seq.). The direct contradiction in which the narrative of the "Mahâvagga" finds itself to this scheme, demonstrates essentially that it contains authentic matter.