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Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8.s1.t2: Buddha's Disciples

Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8.s1.t2

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Buddha's Disciples

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From the exterior aspect of that which we must be satisfied to accept as a picture of this life, our description now turns to the interior. We have yet to acquaint ourselves with the circle of those to whom Buddha's teaching was especially directed, the disciples who endeavoured by following him to find for their souls the path to rest.

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To all appearance this circle of disciples was even in the earliest days by no means a free society, bound together by merely internal cords, something like the band of Jesus' disciples. We can scarcely doubt that it was from the beginning much more of a community of ascetics organized according to fixed rules, a formal monastic order with Buddha at its head. The forms and external technic of a religious life of this class had been already established in India long before the age of Buddha : a monastic order appeared then to the religious consciousness to be the reasonable, natural form, in which alone the life of those who are associated in a common struggle for release could find expression. As there was nothing in Buddha's attitude generally which could be regarded by his contemporaries as unusual, he had not to introduce anything fundamentally new; on the contrary, it would have been an innovation if he had undertaken to preach a way of salvation, which did not proceed on a basis of monastic observances.

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The standing formula with which Buddha is supposed to have received the first believers into this circle has been preserved to us: "Come hither, O monk; well preached is the doctrine, walk in purity, to make an end of all suffering." We know not whether this tradition rests on any authentic memory, but the thought which here finds expression seems quite correct, that the circle of Buddha’s disciples was from the very beginning a monastic brotherhood, into which the postulant had to be admitted by an appointed step, with the utterance of a prescribed formula.

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The yellow garment of the monk and tonsure are the visible tokens of separation from the world and worldly life; the severance of the family bond, the renunciation of all property, rigorous chastity, are the self-evident obligations of the "ascetics who adhere to the son of the Sakya house" (Samanâ Sakyaputtiyâ), the oldest term with which the people designated the members of the young Church.

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We know not how far the forms of that corporate life, of which we shall give a fuller description later on, severally extend back to Buddha’s own time, of which we are now speaking. It is possible, those half-monthly confessional gatherings, to which so great significance is attached in the simple cult of ancient Buddhism, may have been observed by Buddha himself with the disciples who were with him. The tone which prevailed in the assembly of the believers was calm, composed, one might say, ceremonious. Were we permitted to judge by the impression conveyed to us by the sacred writings, we might opine that the sense of tranquil goodness and the quiet self-conscious joy, by which the associated life of these monks was pervaded, were not sufficient to compensate the lack of liveliness in expression and interchange of the experiences and emotions of each individual. Occasions of rapture were not unfrequent, and were desired as a high spiritual good: they consisted rather in quiet transport than in ecstatic excitement. Each aspired to them for himself alone; they knew nothing of that popular enthusiasm which seizes on whole assemblies, where one carries the others away and common emotion excites similar visions in the imagination of hundreds. To boast before the brothers of experiences of ecstasy was strictly forbidden.

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The distinction of caste had no place in this band. Whosoever will be Buddha's disciple renounces his caste. In one of the speeches which the sacred writings put in Buddha's mouth, it is said on this subject: "As the great streams, O disciples, however many they be, the Gangâ, Yamunâ, Aciravatî, Sarabhû, Mahî, when they reach the great ocean, lose their old name and their old descent, and bear only one name, 'the great ocean,' so also, my disciples, these four castes, Nobles, Brahmans, Vaiçya and Çûdra, when they, in accordance with the law and doctrine which the Perfect One has preached, forsake their home and go into homelessness, lose their old name and old paternity, and bear only the one designation, 'Ascetics, who follow the son of the Sakya house.'" And in the discourse "On the fruit of asceticism," in which Buddha answers king Ajâtasattu's question regarding the reward of him who leaves his home and devotes himself to the religious life, Buddha speaks of this matter: if a slave or servant of the king puts on the yellow garment, and lives as a monk without reproach in thought, word and deed, "wouldest thou, then," asks Buddha of the king, "say: well, then, let this man still be my slave and servant, to stand in my presence, bow before me, take upon himself to perform my behests, live to minister to my enjoyments, speak deferentially, hang upon my word?” And the king answers, “No, sire; I should bow before him, stand before him, invite him to sit down, give him what he needed in the way of clothing, food, shelter, and of medicine, when he is ill, and I should assure him of protection, watch and ward, as is becoming.”

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Thus the religious garb of Buddha’s disciples makes lords and commons, Brahmans and Çûdras equal. The gospel of deliverance is not confined to the high-born alone, but is given “to the welfare of many people, to the joy of many people, to the blessing, welfare and joy of gods and men.”

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We can quite understand how historical treatment in our times, which takes a delight in deepening its knowledge of religious movements by bringing into prominence or discovering their social bearings, has attributed to Buddha the rôle of a social reformer, who is conceived to have broken the chains of caste and won for the poor and humble their place in the spiritual kingdom which he founded. But any one who attempts to describe Buddha’s labours must, out of love for truth, resolutely combat the notion that the fame of such an exploit, in whatever way he may depict it to himself, belongs to Buddha. If any one speaks of a democratic element in Buddhism, he must bear in mind that the conception of any reformation of national life, every notion in any way based on the foundation of an ideal earthly kingdom, of a religious Utopia, was quite foreign to this fraternity. There was nothing resembling a social upheaval in India. Buddha’s spirit was a stranger to that enthusiasm, without which no one can pose as the champion of the oppressed against the oppressor. Let the state and society remain what they are; the religious man, who as a monk has renounced the world, has no part in its cares and occupations. Caste has no value for him, for everything earthly has ceased to affect his interests, but it never occurs to him to exercise his influence for its abolition or for the mitigation of the severity of its rules for those who have lagged behind in worldly surroundings.

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While it is true that Buddhism does not reserve to Brahmans only the right of entry into a spiritual life, we must not fall into the error of supposing that Buddha was the first to stand up for this cause and do battle for it. Before his time, probably long before his time, there were religious orders, which received members of all castes, both males and females.* Side by side with the first exclusive religious order of ancient times, the Brahmans, there existed long ere this period, equal to the Brahmans in public estimation, the second religious order of the Samanâ, *i.e.*, ascetics, admission to whose ranks was open to every one who was resolved to renounce a worldly career, whether he was high born or low born. This fact is recognized in the Buddhist traditions as indisputable, as something of which there is no recollection that it had ever been otherwise. There is no need of overrating the value of these traditions, to find in them a guarantee that Buddha did not deem it necessary to undertake a struggle against the leaders of society and thought in behalf of the spiritual rights of the poor and humble: and least of all is it possible that in such a struggle lay the essential character of his life.

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This by no means ends all that might be said against the historically untrue conception of Buddha as the victorious champion of the lower classes against a haughty aristocracy of birth and brain.

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If one speaks of the equality of all within the pale of Buddha's confraternity, it is not altogether superfluous to contrast the theory, which was prevalent on this subject among Buddhists, with the actual facts.

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∗ *Vide antea*, p. 63.

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It is the case, as we have seen, that the Buddhist theory acknowledged the equal right of all persons without distinction to be received into the order, and it could not but acknowledge it, or it would have given up the consequences of its own principles. And indeed it does not appear to have been likely to occur that postulants should be rejected contrary to the law, on the score of caste.* Nevertheless it seems as if the actual composition of the band, which surrounded Buddha’s person, and the composition of the early Church especially, was by no means in due keeping with the theory of equality: if even Brahman exclusiveness was not maintained in its full extent, still a marked leaning to aristocracy seems to have lingered in ancient Buddhism as an inheritance from the past. The sacred writings, in what they openly record as well as in what they imply between the lines, give us sufficient means of drawing a conclusion as to these matters. In the first great address which tradition puts in Buddha’s mouth, the sermon at Benares, there occurs an expression, which unwittingly characterizes, and withal criticizes, as briefly as it did sharply, the state of the early Church. Buddha speaks on that occasion of the highest consummation of religious aspirations, for the sake of which “the sons of noble families (kulaputtâ) leave their homes and go into homelessness.” The disciples who gathered round the teacher coming from the noble house of the Sakyas, the descendant of king Ikshvâku, were themselves for the most part "sons of noble families." If we review the ranks of personages, whom we are accustomed to meet in the texts, we find it clearly indicated, that the real situation was by this phrase described conformably to fact; here are young Brahmans like Sâriputta, Moggallâna, Kaccâna, nobles like Ânanda, Râhula, Anuruddha, sons of the greatest merchants and highest municipal dignitaries, like Yasa, invariably men and youths of the most respectable classes of society, and with an education in keeping with their social status.* Besides there were the numerous ascetics of other sects, converts to the faith of Buddha, who undoubtedly occupied, by birth and breeding, the same social position.† I am not aware of any instance in which a Caṇḍâla—the Pariah of that age—is mentioned in the sacred writings as a member of the order. For the lower order of the people, for those born to toil in manual labour, hardened by the struggle for existence, the announcement of the connection of misery with all forms of existence was not made,* nor was the dialectic of the law of the painful concatenation of

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∗ Otherwise we should expect to find in the Vinaya, the codex of ecclesiastical law, in which the section treating of the reception into the order is especially detailed, distinct regulations directed against this abuse. The Vinaya shows clearly that necessity existed much more to prevent improper concessions of admission (i.e., in the case of persons by whose entry into the order the rights of the Third might have been infringed), than to guard against improper refusals of admission.

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∗ Among the disciples who surrounded Buddha, the barber Upâli is picked out as being a man of low position. Not quite correctly: as barber of the Sakyas he was a courtier, and appears in the tradition as the personal friend of the Sakya youths. *Vide* "Cullavagga," vii, 1-4, and, as to the courtly standing of kings' barbers, cf. "Jâtaka," i, p. 342.

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† It may be observed in this connection that, according to Buddhist dogmatic, a Buddha can be born only as a Brahman or as a noble: in this we have it clearly indicated, that the distinctions of caste have by no means vanished or become worthless to the Buddhist consciousness. There is still much else which points in this direction with characteristic significance. In the narrative of a respected young Brahman who appears in the cloister-garden and asks after Buddha, it is recorded: "Thus the disciples communed among themselves, saying: this youth Ambaṭṭha is respected and of high family, and he is the pupil of a respected Brahman, Pokkharasâti. Truly not undesired by the Exalted One is such an interview with such noble youths" (Ambuṭṭhasutta). And Buddha's beloved disciple, Ânanda, says to his master with reference to a man of the noble house of the Mallas, the rulers over Kusinârâ: "Sire, this Malla Roja, is a respected, well-known person. The good will of such a respected and well-known person towards this doctrine and ordinance is of the highest importance. So then, sire, may the Exalted One be

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pleased to bring it about that the Malla Roja shall be won to this doctrine and ordinance.” And Buddha willingly complies with this request of his disciple (“ Mahâvagga,” vi, 36). If the texts permit any person at random, not specified by name, to come to Buddha and to be taught by him, they describe such a person as a rule as “ a certain Brahman ” (especially numerous instances occur in the “ Anguttara-Nikâya, Tika-Nipâta ”). The text of the Jainas also furnish similar cases. In the simile of the lotus flower, which is to be delivered from the miry earth (in the Sûtrakṛidanga), the flower is not any man at large in need of deliverance, but “ a king.”

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∗ By this it is not meant to imply that people of humble origin in no case appear in the old texts as members of the order. Interesting, but standing quite alone, is the narrative which is attributed to the Thera (Elder) Sunîta in the collection of “ Sayings of the Elders ” (Theragâthâ) : “ I have come of a humble family, I was poor and needy. The work which I performed was lowly, sweeping the withered flowers (out of temples and palaces). I was despised of men, looked down upon and lightly esteemed. With submissive mien I showed respect to many. Then I beheld the Buddha with his band of monks, as he passed, the great hero, into the most important town of Magadha. Then I cast away my burden and ran to bow myself in reverence before him. From pity for me he halted, that highest among men. Then I bowed myself at the Master’s feet, stepped up to him and begged him, the highest among all beings, to accept me as a monk. Then said unto me the gracious Master, the compassionator of all worlds : ‘ Come hither, O monk ;’ that was the initiation which I received.” (Sunîta further relates how he withdrew to the forest, and there wrapt in contemplation, longed for deliverance. The gods came to him and paid him reverence.) “ Then the Master saw me, how the host of the gods surrounded me. A smile broke over his features, and he spake these words : “ By holy zeal and chaste living, by restraint and self-repression, thereby a man becomes a Brahman : that is the highest Brahmanhood.”

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causes and effects calculated to satisfy "the poor in spirit." "To the wise belongeth this law," it is said, "not to the foolish." Very unlike the word of that Man, who suffered "little children to come unto him, for of such is the kingdom of God." For children and those who are like children, the arms of Buddha are not opened.

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Of the several personages in the narrower circle of disciples we cannot expect to have a life-like individual portrait. Here, as everywhere else in the literature of ancient India, we always meet merely with types, not individualities. We have already touched on this peculiarity: each of the chief disciples resembles every other, so that one might be taken for the other, the same conglomerate of perfect purity, perfect internal peace, perfect devotion to Buddha. These are not real individuals but the incarnated *esprit de corps* of the pupils of Buddha.

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The names and the more important surroundings in the life of the individual disciples are undoubtedly authentic. Tradition accords the foremost place among them to those two Brahmans, bound to each other from youth up in bonds of closest friendship, viz., Sâriputta and Moggallâna, who meet us among the converts gained by Buddha in the outset of his career (p. 134, seq.). Throughout his and their long life they followed him faithfully, and they died within a short interval of each other in extreme old age, not long before Buddha's death. It is Sâriputta whom Buddha is believed to have declared to be the most prominent among his followers: he is, it is said,* like the eldest son of a world-ruling monarch, who, following the king, helps him to put in motion the wheel of sovereignty, which he sets rolling over the earth.† Nearest

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[^ *]: "Anguttara Nikâya, Pañcaka-Nipâta." [^ †]: By this description of Sâriputta as "eldest son of the Church," it was not contemplated, however, that he might be called to be Buddha's to these two Brahmans, among those who stand closest to Buddha, is his own cousin, Ánanda, who, when still a youth, adopted the garb of a monk in company with a whole group of young nobles of Sakya family;* his brother Devadatta, whom we shall discover to be the apostate and traitor in the band, was likewise among these Sakyas. The care of Buddha’s person and the ordinary necessities of his daily life, were committed to Ánanda’s hands : often, when Buddha had left all the other disciples behind, it is Ánanda alone who accompanies him, and the narrative of Buddha’s last journeyings and of his farewell address gives, as we shall see, to Ánanda a role, which may well entitle him to be above all others known as the disciple “whom the Master loved.” Another member of this select circle was Upáli, who had formerly served the noble Sakyas as a barber, and who entered Buddha’s order at the same time with his masters. He is frequently mentioned in the sacred writings as the first propounder of the ecclesiastical law of the young Church; it is not improbable that he had a special share in the framing and the scholastic transmission of the old confessional liturgy, from which has sprung the whole ecclesiastical literature of Buddhism. Buddha’s own son, Râhula, whom he had begotten before leaving his father’s roof, also entered the order, and is not unfrequently mentioned with the great disciples already named; a prominent part, however, he does not seem to have played in this band.

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successor, the head of the Church after the Master’s death. The notion of any head of the Church but Buddha himself is, as we shall see, foreign to Buddhism, independently of the fact that tradition could not have chosen a person more ill-adapted to give expression to this idea, than a disciple, who died before Buddha.

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∗ One of the few chronological statements contained in the sacred texts states that this happened twenty-five years before Buddha’s death (“Theragâthâ,” fol. gai of the Phayre MS.).

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The Judas Iscariot among Buddha's disciples—except that his machinations were unsuccessful—is, as narrated, Buddha's own cousin, Devadatta.∗ Stimulated by ambition he seems to have aimed at stepping into the place of Buddha, who had already grown old, and at getting the management of the community into his own hands. When Buddha does not permit this, he attempts, in conjunction with Ajâtasattu, the son of king Bimbisâra, who is aiming at his father's throne, to put the Master out of the way. Their projects fail: miracles are related, by which the life of the Holy One is preserved: the defeated murderers are attacked by fear and trembling, when they come near Buddha; he speaks gently to them, and they are converted to the faith; the piece of rock which is intended to crush Buddha, is interrupted by two converging mountain peaks, so that it merely grazes Buddha's foot: the wild elephant, which is driven against Buddha in a narrow street, remains standing before him, paralyzed by the magic power of his "friendly thought," and then turns tamely back. At last Devadatta is said to have attempted to obtain the leadership of the Church in another way. He makes five propositions, of which we possess an account seemingly quite above suspicion.† On a number of points which affect monastic life, on which Buddha allowed a certain amount of freedom of action at the discretion of the individual member, Devadatta attempted to substitute a more rigorous ascetic praxis for these liberal regulations: for instance, he insisted that a monk should have his camping-place all his life long in the jungle, while Buddha permitted him to live in the neighbourhood of towns and villages, and was himself accustomed to live there; a monk was, furthermore, to live only on the contributions which he collected on his begging excursions, and was not to accept any invitations to dine with the pious laity; he was to dress himself only in clothes made up of gathered rags; and more of the like. Whoever acted otherwise, would be punished with expulsion from the community. Devadatta proposed these rules as the fundamental principles of a true and rigid spiritual life, in opposition to Buddha’s arrangements as a lax concession to human frailties, and he tried to draw off to himself the monks around Buddha: if we may believe tradition, with a transient success, which then turned into total discomfiture. Devadatta is said to have come to a deplorable end.*

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∗ The oldest form of the narratives regarding Devadatta is to be found in the seventh book of the "Cullavagga."

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† "Cullavagga." It is possible, but naturally it cannot be demonstrated, that the history of these five propositions and the schism brought about by Devadatta are the only historical kernel of these narratives, and that the attempts at murder are an invention, which the orthodox Buddhist tried to tack on to the memory of the hated heretic.

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∗ According to the later wide-spread version of the narrative, the jaws of hell opened and swallowed him alive; the narrative of the “Cullavagga,” as a matter of course, represents him going to hell, but says nothing of this departure to hell in living form.

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These are the most prominent figures in the band of Buddha’s disciples; but disciples in deed and in truth those alone are who give up all that is earthly to, as the formula puts it, “walk in holiness, to put an end to all suffering:” monks and nuns, with the Indian designations, “bhikkhu” (beggar, *m.*) and “bhikkhunî” (beggar, *f.*). But, as in the history of Jesus, Lazarus and Nicodemus, Mary and Martha, stand side by side with Peter and John, so Buddhism also, side by side with the male and female mendicants recognize male and female votaries (upâsaka, *m.*; upâsika, *f.*) of Buddha and his law, believers, who honour Buddha as the holy preacher of deliverance and his word as the word of truth, but who remain in their worldly position, in wedlock, in the possession of their property, and make themselves useful to the Church, as far as they can, by gifts and charities of every kind. Yet the monks alone, not the lay-adherents, are exclusively members of the Church.*

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The formation of this wider circle of worldly believers has been regarded as an inconsistent relaxation of original Buddhism, as a concession on the part of clear and rigorous thought to practicability and the weakness of human nature. It has also been supposed that in the oldest texts the distinction to be found is only between professed believers, *i.e.*, monks, and non-believers, *i.e.*, the laity, but not that of believing monks and believing laity. This is wholly erroneous. The oldest traditions which we possess speak of the laity, who profess to be friends and votaries of Buddha and the order, and the nature of the case compels us to attach credit to those traditions. There must in fact, since ever there were mendicant monks in India, have also been pious laymen, who gave something to these religious beggars, and there must also soon have grown up, whether with or without recognized forms and names, it is quite immaterial, a certain relationship between definite monks or monastic orders and a definite laity, who felt themselves bound to each other, the one class to receive spiritual instruction, the other to obtain the little that they needed for their maintenance. And more than a connection of this class, the relation which subsisted between Buddha’s order and the lay-believers has not been.

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∗ A close examination of the relations between the monks proper and lay-associates must obviously be reserved for the sketch of "Church Life" (part iii). It will suffice in this place to point out that the idea of lay-members (upâsaka) in Buddhist Church-law cannot be taken in the same sense as a technical term as that of monks (bhikkhu) : in the latter idea there is involved a definite *de jure* relationship, in the former the relationship is rather *de facto* than inherently *de jure*. For anyone to become a bhikkhu a special procedure is necessary on the part of the Church to complete the fact; the case of a person who desires to be considered an upâsaka expresses this, of course, and the texts have in this case also, as for everything that occurs with frequency, a definite formula ("I take, sire, my refuge with the Exalted One, and with the Doctrine, and with the Order of the disciples; may the Exalted One accept me as his votary [upâsaka] from this day forward through my life, me who have taken refuge with him"), but no special procedure follows, no recognition of the upâsaka as such on the part of the Church. Furthermore there were no ties which prohibited the Buddhist upâsaka from being at the same time the upâsaka of another Church (cf. "Cullav.," v, 20, 3), so that it appears in every way impossible to identify the position of the upâsaka with anything we understand to be among the components of a Church.

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Princes and nobles, Brahmans and merchants, we find among those who “took their refuge in Buddha, the Law, and the Order,” *i.e.*, who made their profession as lay-believers; the wealthy and the aristocrat, it seems, here also exceeded the poor; to reach the humble and wretched, the sorrowing, who endured yet another sorrow than the great universal sorrow of inpermanence, was not the province of Buddhism.

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Prominent among the “adherents” stand the two royal friends of Buddha, Bimbisâra, the ruler of Magadha, and Pasenadi, the ruler of Kosala, both approximately the same age as Buddha, and throughout their lives true protectors of his Church. Then comes Jîvaka, the renowned physician-in-ordinary to Bimbisâra,[*] who was appointed by the king to undertake medical attendance, not on him and his women only, but also on Buddha and Buddha’s order; next, the merchant Anâthapindika, who had presented to the order the garden of Jetavana, Buddha’s favourite place of resort. In all important

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[*] The story of Jîvaka and the wonderful cures which he effects is related in the Eighth Book of the “Mahâvagga.”

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places which Buddha touched in the course of his wanderings, he found bands of such lay-believers, who went out to meet him, arranged for assemblies, in which Buddha spoke, who gave him and his companions their meals, who placed their residences and gardens at their disposal, or made them over to the order as Church property. If he went wandering about with hundreds of his disciples, pious votaries were sure to accompany him on his journey with carts and waggons, and they brought necessaries of life, salt, and oil with them, for each in his turn to prepare the wanderer a meal, and crowds of needy folk followed in their train to snatch the remains of these provisions.

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