"All that has been spoken by the Lord Buddha has been well spoken." Thus the Buddhist Emperor Asoka proclaimed to his subjects, and the words are still to be seen on the rock where, over two thousand years ago, he caused them to be engraved. He was evidently referring to a body of teaching, for in the same edict he went on to specify several passages which the monks, nuns, and lay people should hear and learn. We cannot from this infer that the whole of the teaching, the Dhamma, existed at that time in the form in which we have it now, since it was then preserved only by memory. As Asoka's words imply, it was all heard and learnt by heart.
It is certain, however, that from the beginning the Buddhist community was in possession of rules and discourses, which they held to be the actual words of their Founder. Whatever may have been added, and we know that discourses by elders were included, the disciples aimed at preserving the Buddha-word. There is every reason to think that from the first they should have had a body of doctrine. For forty-five years Buddha had taught his followers, and for the first twenty years of that period he had wandered from village to village and city to city preaching to all castes and classes of men.
It was also a part of the duties of the monks to go preaching. They had been told to teach the Doctrine "for the profit and happiness of many, out of com-passion for the world, for the good, profit, and happiness of gods and men". Whatever else may have become included in the Scriptures there is no reason to doubt that the original teaching is in them.
This conclusion does not rest merely upon the un-supported belief of devout adherents. In recent years much has been discovered about the Scriptures of schools other than the Pali tradition. There is the Mahasanghika school, usually held to have been the origin of the first schism, and the Sarvastivadins, a group of schools that became the most widely spread in India. It would be easy to draw up a doctrinal compendium from their Scriptures almost in the same words as are given in the present selection. Not only can we infer a common doctrinal basis, but we can see that this basis existed before the break up into schools, for besides the common material we also find a common arrangement of dis-courses and monastic rules. There are differences, but they are such as would inevitably arise in a large body of Scriptures preserved by memory. When these other schools developed peculiar doctrines of their own they never thought of tampering with the word of Buddha by introducing their own doctrines into the text. They composed other works, which always remained distinct from the collection of discourses and the monastic rules. Even the Mahayana schools, which centuries later so greatly modified the conception of the disciple's career, left the old body of Scriptures and the monastic rules intact.
These questions of historical origins, however, can only be approached from the evidence now existing, that is, from the extant Scriptures. Before seeking to "pull down the superstructure" it will be well to determine what that superstructure is. From that we may get a picture of the actual historical Buddhism which developed in India and spread to countries where it still flourishes. The present selection aims at giving the chief characteristics as we find them in the Suttas or Discourses and the Vinaya or Book of Discipline. There we find set out a way of life expressed in a system of moral teaching and methods of meditation, by which the disciple becomes freed from hindrances and attains to full knowledge of the Truths. By starting from the actual Buddhist scheme we avoid as far as possible the danger of introducing the subjective impressions that western interpreters have often read into the system.
Art (289)
Biography (239)
Buddha (1969)
Children (95)
Deities (48)
Healing (35)
Hinduism (56)
History (544)
Language & Literature (464)
Mahayana (413)
Mythology (91)
Philosophy (456)
Sacred Sites (115)
Tantric Buddhism (90)
Send as free online greeting card
Email a Friend
Manage Wishlist