Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8.s1.t5.26

c8.s1.t5.26

Here and there the outward garb of such narratives is somewhat altered; instead of a sermon we find a dialogue; Buddha questions or is questioned. In the task of producing a life-like picture of such conversations as took place in Buddha's time, or in their own circles, the compilers of our sacred texts, who had not many things to go upon, but had nothing less than a dramatic vein, have certainly in their mode of treatment failed most signally. Those who converse with Buddha are good for nothing else but simply to say "yes," and to be eventually converted, if they have not yet been converted.* But any one who does not suffer himself to be deterred by this want of living concrete reality from following up the logical train of these conversations, will here find more than one trace, though dim and unskilful, of the same maieutic method of dialectic, which history has properly denominated Socratic, after the name of the man who has practised it incomparably more perfectly, among a more brilliantly-gifted people—the same sifting of spiritual truths by argument from analogies which daily life supplies, the same rudiments of the inductive method.