Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c8.s1.t5.7

c8.s1.t5.7

Anyone who reads the lectures which the sacred texts put in Buddha's mouth, can scarcely refrain from asking whether the form, in which he himself taught his doctrine, can possibly have resembled these self-same panoramas of abstract and often abstruse structures with their endless repetitions piled high upon each other. Should we not like to see in the picture of those early times something else beside merely a living spirit operating with the fresh vigour of youth in the circle of master and pupils, and should we not for that reason be inclined to eliminate from this picture all that imparts to it an air of tension and fiction? And at the same time is it natural, when we endeavour to obtain a representation of Buddha's teaching and preaching, for us to resort to another source beside the tradition of the Buddhist Church, that is, when thought, consciously or unconsciously, recurs to the teaching of Jesus? Those homely sentences with their totally unstudied external setting and their deep internal wealth, seem to wear that very form, from which we may infer that it, or some similar form, may have accompanied the dissemination of the Buddhist doctrine, as long as the spirit of the early ages survived.