Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8.22

c8.22

Here it must be premised as a cardinal statement: a biography of Buddha has not come down to us from ancient times, from the age of the Pâli texts, and, we can safely say, no such biography was in existence then.[*] This is, moreover, very easily understood. The idea of biography was foreign to the mind of that age. To take the life of a man as a whole, its development from beginning to end, as a unified subject for literary treatment, this thought, though it appears to us natural and obvious, had not occurred to any one yet in that age.