Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8.s1.9

c8.s1.9

Are we not to believe that this same law has also governed the beginnings of Buddhist life? The great disciples, who clustered round the Master, Sâriputta and Moggallâna, Upâli, and Ânanda, completely resemble each other in the old narratives, and their picture is nothing else but the invariably uniform copy of Buddha himself, only on a reduced scale. The reality was hardly much otherwise: the individual was little more than a specimen, which the general spirit disclosed to view, and this general spirit again was, with reference to the forms in which it outwardly displayed itself, scarcely intrinsically different from the spirit of Buddha himself and the forms among which Buddha's life was passed.