Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8.s1.t5.16

c8.s1.t5.16

The periods of these addresses in their motionless and rigid uniformity, on which no lights and shadows fall, are an accurate picture of the world as it presented itself to the eye of that monastic fraternity, the grim world of origination and decease, which goes on like clockwork in an ever uniform course, and behind which rests the still deep of the Nirvâna. In the words of this ministry, there is heard no sound of working within, no voice of yearning, nothing which—passing from person to person with the power which the utterance of a superior man possesses, and with all the relentlessness which is inseparable from that power—may fasten on the hearers. No impassioned entreating of men to come to the faith, no bitterness for the unbelieving who remains afar off. In these addresses, one word, one sentence, lies beside another in stony stillness, whether it expresses the most trivial thing or the most important. As worlds of gods and worlds of men are, for the Buddhist consciousness, ruled by everlasting necessity, so also are the worlds of ideas and of verities: for these, too, there is one, and only one, necessary form of knowledge and expression, and the thinker does not make this form but he adopts what is ready to hand—as Buddha speaks, so countless Buddhas in countless ages of the world have spoken and will speak. Therefore, everything which resembles a free or arbitrary dealing of the mind with the material, must be absent from the diction of this ministration of salvation; every idea, every thought, has the same right to be heard in full and uncurtailed at the place which belongs to it, and thus those endless repetitions accumulate which Buddha's disciples were never tired of listening to anew, and always honouring afresh as the necessary garb of holy thought, as something which should be so and not otherwise. One might often fancy that at Buddha's time the human mind had not yet discovered the magic word which joins together the lengths of disconnected co-ordinates into one compact whole, the insignificant but powerful word "and." Hear how one of the most renowned discourses expresses the thought that all man's senses and the world, which they apprehend, are attacked and wasted by the sorrow-bringing powers of the earthly and the impermanent as by a flaming fire.∗