Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8.s1.t5.13

c8.s1.t5.13

If, therefore, we do not wish, out of deference to a universal feeling of probability, which has based its standard on a ground other than Indian, to destroy the singularity and continuity of Indian developments, we must be on our guard against making a fanciful picture of Buddha, as if he were one of those aboriginal natures living only amid the concrete and tangible, to whom the spirit is everything, the letter nothing. His thought drew its nourishment from the long course of metaphysical speculation which preceded him; he shares the delight in the metaphysical which is inherent in the Indian blood, the taste for abstraction, classification, and construction, and viewing him from this aspect, we should compare him not so much to the founder of Christianity, as to its theological champions, something such as Origen was. Thus we cannot refuse credence to the tradition which, in however many forms it makes Buddha speak, yet represents the particular weight of his teaching as lying in great lectures, beside which dialogue and parable, fable and sententious sayings, appear to be something merely adventitious or marginal.