Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8.29

c8.29

Comparatively few are the memoranda preserved in the older authorities regarding the early life of Buddha, the years preceding the beginning of his professional career, or, to put it as the Indians are wont to do, the period prior to the attainment of the Buddhahood, when he had not yet acquired, but was still seeking, that saving knowledge, which constituted him the teacher of the worlds of gods and men. That we hear less of these days than of others, is explicable. The interest of the Church was fixed not so much on his worldly character as the child and heir of the Sakya house, as on the person of the “exalted, sacred, universal Buddha.” People desired to know what he had uttered from that time forward, when he had become the Buddha; behind that vanished the interest in everything else, even the interest in this struggle for the Buddhahood.* It is later centuries which have built up a history of Buddha with wonders piled on wonders on a scale quite different from older times, and which first devoted themselves with special zeal to surrounding the form of the blessed child with the extravagant creations of a boundless imagination.