Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c9.s1.6

c9.s1.6

Yet this deliverance is not an inheritance for the poor in spirit but only for the wise. And therefore the Buddhist doctrine of deliverance is by no means content with merely those simple ethical reflections, which appeal more to the sensation of a pure heart than to the intellectual faculty of a trained mind. The main outlines of the doctrine might be grasped by every one endowed with a lively feeling among the members of the Church; the more detailed dialectical deductions, however, the proficiency in which was by no means regarded as an unnecessary accomplishment, can have been within the grasp of but comparatively few individuals, even among a people so exceptionally highly endowed with a capacity for dealing with abstract thought as the Indians, and among men who devoted their whole life exclusively to these very thoughts. In the circles of the ancient Church also they were fully conscious of this. “To men concerned with worldly pursuits, who have their occupation and find their pleasure in worldly pursuits, will this matter be difficult to comprehend, the law of causality, the chain of causes and effects;” thus Buddha is said to have remarked to himself, before he took upon himself to preach his doctrine (p. 120). And so we find, when we open the sacred writings of the Buddhists, side by side with those simple, beautiful apothegms, such as are contained in the Dhammapada, those most abstruse dogmatic expositions also, those circuitous, much-involved systems of ideas, comprehensive classifications, long lists of categories, which are held together by a causal nexus or some other logical tie. “If this be, that also is; if this arises, that also arises; if this be not, then that also is not; if this perishes, that also perishes:”* thus they were accustomed to reason in the period in which the sacred writings originated, and we have already (p. 182) seen that it is probable, that Buddha’s own mode of thought and speech moved in these very paths of abstract discussion, of technical, often scholastic expression and of a, it may be, not very dexterous dialectic.