Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8.217

c8.217

This is the sermon at Benares, which tradition gives as the opening of the ministry of Buddha, by which he, as his disciples expressed themselves, "has set in motion the wheel of the law." One may entertain whatever opinion he pleases regarding the historical truth with which this sermon is reported—I am inclined, for my part, to entertain no very high opinion of it—but even the more freely concocted one may take this discourse to be, only the more highly must he rate its fundamental importance, for he is so much the more certain here to find, if not the words actually spoken on the occasion of a definite occurrence, at any rate the ideas which the ancient Church regarded, and certainly not improperly regarded, as the real lever in the preaching of their master. Clearly and sharply defined are the leading thoughts, which stand in the middle of the contracted solemn thought-world, in which the Buddhist Church lived: in the centre of all one sole idea, the idea of deliverance. Of deliverance, of that from which we are to be delivered, of the way in which we shall be delivered, of this and of nothing else does this sermon of Buddha's, and, we may add, do the sermons of Buddha as a rule, treat. God and the universe trouble not the Buddhist: he knows only one question: how shall I in this world of suffering be delivered from suffering? We shall have to return to the answer which the sermon at Benares gives to this question.