Buddha: His Life, his Doctrine, his Order c9.s1.8

c9.s1.8

On the whole we shall be authorized to refer to Buddha himself† the most essential trains of thought which we find recorded in the sacred texts, and, in many places, it is probably not too much to believe that the very words, in which the ascetic of the Sakya house couched his gospel of deliverance, have come down to us as they fell from his lips. We find that throughout the vast complex of ancient Buddhist literature which has been collected, certain mottoes and formulas, the expression of Buddhist convictions upon some of the weightiest problems of religious thought, are expressed over and over again in a standard form adopted once for all. Why may not these be words which have received their currency from the founder of Buddhism, which had been spoken by him hundreds and thousands of times throughout his long life, devoted to teaching?