Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8.s1.t5.38

c8.s1.t5.38

But the most beautiful embellishments of Buddha's preaching are those poetical sentences in which all the most delicate powers of light and warmth, which dwell within the Buddhist mind, are concentrated as it were in a focus. Here we need not by any means see merely a poetic embellishment which the Church has attributed to its master's teaching; sentences of this kind, short improvisations, to which the pliant nature of the Çloka-metre readily adapted itself, may very well have been actually a feature of Buddha's mode of speech, and of that specially-gifted among his disciples.* These apothegms are so unlike the dry numbness of the prose lectures, that we may be tempted to ask whether they were really the same spirits which have composed the one and the other. We feel how that prose confined and bound up those who spoke in it; but when the domain of prose ceases, where men are expressing not dry, subtle systems of ideas, but the simple emotions, the sorrows and hopes of their own hearts, life is roused and the blood of life, poetry. Thoughtful feeling, clad in the grand and rich attire of Indian metaphor, looks out upon us, and the Çlokas with their gently measured rhythms, so peculiarly combining uniformity and diversity, flow up and down like the surging billows of the sea, on which the clear sky is reflected amid variegated, fragrant lotus flowers. The soul of this poesy, too, is nothing else but what the soul of the Buddhist faith itself is, the one thought, which rings out in sublime monotony from all these apothegms: Unhappy, impermanence, happy he who has the eternal. From this thought there pervades the proverbial wisdom of the Buddhist, that tone of deep, happy repose, of which that proud sentence says that the gods themselves envy it, that repose which looks down upon the struggling world, stoops to the most distressed and quietly extends to him the picture of absolute peace. For the elucidation of Buddhism nothing better could happen than that, at the very outset of Buddhist studies, there should be presented to the student by an auspicious hand the Dhammapada,* that most beautiful and richest of collections of proverbs, to which anyone who is determined to come to know Buddhism must over and over again return, and to which we shall often have to allude in our sketch of the Buddhist teaching.