The History of Buddhist Thought c15.35

c15.35

The relations of the upanishadic literature to Buddhism have been most fully studied by Oldenberg.¹ He points out the widely separated geographical position and the consider-ably later form of the buddhistic literature as shown in language, metre, the development of continuous thought, and management of dialogue. Another distinction is that the upanishads give us a picture only of village life, while the suttas show us city life, highly developed trade, and luxurious habits of living. The last point, however, is not very significant. We can speak of a literature contemporary with Buddha, but we find it embedded in a mass of legends which may be two centuries or more later. The memorizers who invented or adopted these legends had no historic sense to preserve the archaic features of previous centuries. They described the towns, the social life, the courtesans and traders of their own time as they knew them, and what they tell us of them is not, nor was it ever meant to be, the word of Buddha.