The History of Buddhist Thought c12.106

c12.106

It is notorious that Buddhism was far from being " simply a system of earnest self-culture and self-control ". Some of its presuppositions are already implied in the above scheme—a universe into any part of which a being might be born, and ruled by an inexorable law which determined him to be reborn according to his actions. It is still disputed whether original Buddhism was " nothing but vulgar magic and thaumaturgy coupled with hypnotic practices ", or whether Buddha was a " follower of some philosophic system in the genre of Patanjali's "—to take two extreme views. It is certain that the philosophic system came to exist, with theories of the nature of the individual, his career according to a law of causation, and the doctrine of his final destiny; and then with the Mahāyāna movement a transformation of all the problems through a new theory of reality and a conception of the Enlightened One which made him indistinguishable from the highest conceptions of Hindu deity.