The Religions of India: Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume 1, Edited by Morris JastrowHopkins, Edward Washburn
Religion
The Religions of India: Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume 1, Edited by Morris Jastrow
Hopkins, Edward Washburn
India -- Religion
The geographical growth of formal Buddhism is easily sketched. After
the first entrance into Kashmeer and Ceylon, in the third century
B.C., the progress of the cult, as it now may be called, was steadily
away from India proper. In the fifth century A.D., it was adopted in
Burmah,[65] and in the seventh in Siam. The Northern school kept in
general to the 'void' doctrine of N[=a]g[=a]rjuna, whose chief texts
are the Lotus and the Lalita Vistara, standard works of the Great
Vehicle.[66] In Tibet Lamaism is the last result of this hierarchical
state-church.[67] We have thought it much more important to give a
fuller account of early Buddhism, that of Buddha, than a full account
of a later growth in regions that, for the most part, are not Indic,
in the belief that the P[=a]li books of Ceylon give a truer picture of
the early church than do those of Kashmeer and Nep[=a]l, with their
Çivaite and Brahmanic admixture. For in truth the Buddhism of China
and Tibet has no place in the history of Indic religions. It may have
been introduced by Hindu missionaries, but it has been re-made to suit
a foreign people. This does not apply, of course, to the canonical
books, the Great Vehicle, of the North, which is essentially native,
if not Buddhistic. Yet of the simple narrative and the adulterated
mystery-play, if one has to choose, the former must take precedence.
From the point of view of history, Northern Buddhism, however old its
elements, can be regarded only as an admixture of Buddhistic and
Brahmanic ideas. For this reason we take a little more space, not to
cite from the Lotus or the grotesque Lalita Vistara,[68] but to
illustrate Buddhism at its best. Fausböll, who has translated the
dialogue that follows, thinks that in the Suttas of the
Sutta-nip[=a]ta there is a reminiscence of a stage of Buddhism before
the institution of monasteries, while as yet the disciples lived as
hermits. The collection is at least very primitive, although we doubt
whether the Buddhist disciples ever lived formally as individual
hermits. All the Samanas are in groups, little 'congregations,' which
afterwards grew into monasteries.
This is a poetical (amoebic) contest between the herdsman Dhaniya and
Buddha, with which Fausböll[69] compares St. Luke, xii. 16, but which,
on the other hand reminds one of a spiritualized Theocritus, with whom
its author was, perhaps, contemporary.
I have boiled the rice, I have milked the kine--so said the
herdsman Dhaniya--I am living with my comrades near the
banks of the (great) Mah[=i] river; the house is roofed, the
fire is lit--then rain if thou wilt, O sky!
I am free from anger, free from stubbornness--so said the
Blessed One--I am abiding for one night near the banks of
the (great) Mah[=i] river; my house has no cover, the fire
(of passion) is extinguished--then rain if thou wilt, O sky!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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