Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8.s1.t5.15

c8.s1.t5.15

speaker also is not a matter of indifference: a strict ceremonial regulates his appearance and his movements. Thus men were wont to think in Brahman circles long before Buddha’s time; thus they were wont to think in the Buddhist Church at the time in which our texts were compiled. Are we to suppose that Buddha and the circles around him, standing in the middle between this epoch and that, felt differently from both? However widely form, tone, and movement in the didactic lectures, which we find in the sacred texts, may differ from what appears to us the natural and necessary manner of living, spoken language, anyone who knows how to apply different standards to things differing in their conditions, will find it not impossible to believe that the solemnly earnest style of address of Buddha was much more nearly allied to the type of the addresses preserved to us by tradition, than to that which our feeling of the natural and the probable might be tempted to substitute for it.