SINCE the appearance of the epoch-making Rhys Davids, Kern, and Oldenberg, the king works of history of Buddha and Buddhism have been greatly increased. The accessions to our knowledge of the Pali texts are indeed chiefly due to Rhys Davids, but these new data have never been incorporated with previous results, nor has an estimate been made of the extent to which they modify earlier conclusions.
The present work attempts to set forth what is known from the records, and to utilise information that has never yet been presented in a Western form. Even now much of the material is accessible only in works published in Burma, Siam, and Ceylon, but the great work begun by Rhys Davids in establishing the Pali Text Society is still vivified by his spirit, and continues in the fruitful labours of his successors. Not the least of his achievements is the Pali Text Society's Dictionary, now completed by Dr. W. Stede. All the Pali passages quoted in the course of this work have been either translated or retranslated by me in the light of the evidence accumulated by these scholars.
There has been a tendency in Germany and England to depend almost entirely on the Pali sources, neglecting the works of schools preserved in Sanskrit, and in Tibetan and Chinese translations from the Sanskrit, which although often later than the Päli, yet are parallel and more or less independent traditions, and cannot safely be ignored. The Pali itself is no primitive record, but the growth of a long tradition in one school. The Sanskrit needs to be equally closely analysed; and if the result tends to show the historical weakness of a narrative based on one set of records, the fin 1 conclusions are all the more reliable.
All the traditions are subordinate to the fact of the establishing of a system of doctrine and a religious order. The earliest form of the doctrine is still a matter of controversy, but it is possible to separate off much that is agreed to be the development of later centuries. One important fact brought out by the comparison of Sanskrit sources is the fundamental doctrinal agreement in the earlier schools, a result which makes it impossible to treat the Pali tradition as a truncated or perverted form of a nobler teaching. Mahayana doctrines are doubtless older than the works in which we find them expounded, but they do not belong to the oldest schools.
How far Buddhism now possesses validity as a religion is a further question, on which opinions diverge greatly. A recent writer has said that "all that has hitherto been held to be the ancient Buddha doctrine is false, inasmuch as its root idea, with the passage of time, has no longer been understood, nay has actually been perverted into its very opposite "1 For this writer Buddhism is "not one religion among many others, but as the most perfect reflection of the highest actuality, the Absolute Religion". It may be that this writer is not so exclusively in possession of the truth as his words seem to imply, but while such views are held, it is surely of the first importance to know what our documents actually say, and what the earliest interpreters thought they meant.
A SIA is the grave as well as the cradle of religions. They have disappeared not merely with the crumbling of ancient civilisations, but have been swept away before the victorious progress of new forms of belief. One of the most widely spread of these spiritual conquerors has been Buddhism, extending from India over great portions of southern and central Asia and permeating the ancient religions of China and Japan.
Yet until modern times nothing of the real nature of Buddhism was known. The scientific investigators who followed in the train of Alexander the Great describe various Indian religious sects, but do not specifically mention Buddhism. The first Christian writer to mention Buddha is Clement of Alexandria at the end of the third century, who speaks of "those of the Indians that obey the precepts of Boutta, whom through exaggeration of his dignity they honour as a god."1 Buddha was also known to the Mani-chacans. Al Bīrunī quotes a work by Mani (c. 216-276 A.D.), the Shaburkan, in which the great heretic claims as three of his predecessors Buddha, Zoroaster, and Jesus. The Acts of Archelaus (early fourth century), which purport to be the record of a debate between Mani and a bishop Archelaus, speak of a predecessor of Mani, Terebinthus, who spread a report about himself, saying that he was filled with all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was now called not Tere-binthus but Budda. He pretended that he had been born of a virgin and brought up by an angel on the mountains. This work was known to St. Jerome, and from it he may have got his statement that Buddha was born of a virgin. The Acts do not say that Buddha was of virgin birth, but only that Terebinthus, who called himself Buddha, made that claim. St. Jerome attributes to the gymnosophists the belief that "a virgin gave birth from her side to Budda, the chief person of their teaching." His statement about the virgin birth may be as much a confusion as his view that Buddha's followers were the gymnosophists. There were gymnosophists or naked ascetics in India, but they were not Buddhists.
In the thirteenth century MARCO POLO had heard of Buddha in Ceylon, whom he named by his Mongolian title of Sagamoni Barcan, a fact which makes it probable that some of his information came from Mongolia. He describes him as the son of the king of Ceylon and the first great idol-founder, though he knew of his greatness as a moral teacher, and declared that if he had been a Christian, he would have been a great saint of our Lord Jesus Christ, so good and pure was the life he led.
In 1660 ROBERT KNOX, an English seaman, was taken prisoner by the Singhalese, and remained in captivity nineteen years. He mentions Buddha as "a great God, whom they call Buddou, to whom the Salvation of Souls belongs. Him they believe once to have come upon the earth. And when he was here, that he did usually sit under a large shady Tree, called Bogahah." But a much more circumstantial account was given by SIMON DE LA LOUBÈRE, envoy from Louis XIV to the king of Siam in 1867-8.4 He had passages from Pali books translated, which give some of the Buddha legend in an intelligible form. He too thought that Buddha was the son of a king of Ceylon. The Indian missionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were much more astray.
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