The History of Buddhist Thought c18.25

c18.25

Colebrooke’s view was first discussed by Burnouf,² but as he had to depend chiefly on Tibetan translations the question was not much advanced. He assumed that extinction meant the extinction of the individual. The problem has been much discussed since, sometimes with an evident bias showing the influence of the writer’s own views of the nature of human destiny. Another unfortunate fact has been the habit of speaking of the passages in the Scriptures as the *ipsissima verba* of Buddha without testing the assumption, in spite of the emphatic words of Franke that “it is given as yet to no mortal man to demonstrate that any one Buddhist sentence was spoken during the lifetime of the Founder.” ³