India And Buddhism ( Sacred Book )

THE SACRED BOOKS AND EARLY LITERATURE OF THE EAST

VOLUME X

I N D I A A N D B U D D H I S M
In Translations by
CHARLES F. AIKEN, S.T.D., Dean of Theology, Catholic University,
Washington, D. C.; SIR M. COOM^RA SWAMY, of the Legislative
Council of Ceylon; HERMANN OLDENBERG, Ph.D., Professor of Sanskrit
at Kiel University; T. W. RHYS DAVIDS, Professor of Pali and
Buddhist Literature, University College, London; JAMES LEGGE,
LL.D., former Professor of Chinese at Oxford University; F. MAX
MULLER, LL.D., former Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford
University; REV. P. BIGANDET, Bishop of Burmah; ROMESH
CHUNDER DUTT, C.I.E., of the Royal Asiatic Society; HENRY CLARKE
WARREN, formerly of Harvard University.

With a Brief Bibliography by
PROF. CHARLES F. AIKEN, S.T.D.

With an Historical Survey and Descriptions by
PROF. CHARLES F. HORNE, PH.D.

India And Buddhism ( English Translated )

India And Buddhism ( Sacred Book ) ISBN

*************************************
"As the great sea, disciples, is permeated with but one taste,
the taste of salt, so also, disciples, this doctrine and this law are
pervaded with but one taste, the taste of deliverance."
BUDDHA.
"An evil deed, like newly drawn milk, does not turn suddenly;
smoldering, like fire covered by ashes, it follows the fool."
THE DHAMMAPADA.

Introduction
BUDDHIST LITERATURE

THE MOST WIDE-SPREAD ARYAN TEACHING IN THE WORLD

FOE our Western world the Buddhist faith and the

Buddhist literature hold a more living interest than any

other of the books or teachings of the Far East In the first

place, Buddhism, both in its doctrines and in its history,

bears a striking resemblance to Christianity. Second,

Buddhism even to-day has more believers than any other

religion in the world ; it is the accepted faith of four hundred

million people, one-fourth of the population of the earth.

Third, it has had a remarkable and romantic career; it has

been called the great exiled religion, for, despite the many

millions of its supporters, it is practically abandoned in

India, the land of its origin. At one time it was accepted

by almost all of India's teeming millions ; then it was completely

trodden under foot, its shrines fell into ruin and were

as wholly forgotten as though they had never existed. Even

to-day, the few Buddhist devotees found in India are pilgrims

who have journeyed there under the shelter of Britain's

Christian protection. So while Buddhism has claimed the

faith and satisfied the hearts of all the other peoples of the

Far East, it has been rejected by the race who first felt its high inspiration.

We touch here on a fourth and perhaps even deeper source

of interest in the faith. It is of Aryan origin, the chief

religion that has sprung wholly from the Aryan mind and

been spread abroad by Aryan teachers. Almost all the peoples

of our Western world to-day are of Aryan stock. Note

therefore this striking contrast, which is one of the most

impressive oddities of our tangled universe. All the modern

European and American Aryans have abandoned their

ancient Aryan faith, whether of Odin, of Jupiter, or of older

gods, and have accepted Christianity, which is of Semitic

origin. Yet scarce a Semite in all the world now holds with

us to this Semitic teaching. On the other hand, Buddhism,

the richest, broadest, and most lasting of the religions of

Aryan origin, has now scarcely an Aryan believer anywhere.

It has become the faith of the hundred millions of Turanians,

or non-Semitic and non-Aryan races of the East.

Shall we seek a more specific knowledge of this ancient

and wide-spread Aryan teaching? It originated about five

hundred years before Christ, being taught by an Indian

prince named Siddharthd. He was a truly wondrous

teacher, whose followers have since worshiped him through all .^

the ages without for one moment confusing him with God or

regarding him as anything different from a man, a soul, a

spirit like themselves. For this teacher Siddhartha the

Buddhists have many names. Most commonly they speak

of him by his religious title as Buddha, which means " The

Awakened One." That is, he is the sage, the seer, who has

shaken off all the benumbing influences of the senses, has

escaped the daze and bewilderment of human passions, has

pierced the confusing mists of life and thought, and has thus

seen and understood the very heart of the universe. From

that center of serene and perfect understanding Buddha is

supposed to have looked out over all space, and all time, and

comprehended every smallest thing within the boundless

reach of his perfected vision. But note that in thus becom-

ing Buddha or the Awakened One, Prince Siddhartha did

not cease to be a man. Indeed, Buddhism teaches that there

had been other "awakenings" before that of Siddhartha, and

that there will be other Buddhas yet to come. This might

almost be taken as the essence, the central thought, of the

Aryan religious teaching. It founds its confidence on man,

is profoundly assertive of human possibilities and power;

man is everything; he can achieve everything; he can learn

to grasp the universe; he can rise above it. Each feeble,

groveling soul among us can himself become Buddha, the

all-powerful, the all-knowing.

It has been pointed out by our Western thinkers that in

such a system there is very little use for God; there is perhaps

no room for him. Hence Buddhism has been frequently

accused of being a form of atheism. Its believers deny this ;

they are willing to accept any number of deities. Only

their thought centers not on gods, but on man, on man's

progress rising or falling through many transmigrations of

body, but always capable of attaining superiority to and

thus escape from the "wheel of life." Man, the immaterial

spirit, may rise above both the material and the immaterial

world, and thereby reach " Nirvana."

What is this Nirvana, this goal toward which man's struggle

aims? With our Western fondness for exact wordings,

we have insisted on defining it as "nothingness," since in

Nirvana the spirit ceases wholly to act or feel, that is to "suffer

or enjoy, or to think, or even to believe. That is, it absolutely

escapes or abandons every human idea or mode of consciousness.

Yet you will find no Buddhist philosopher

agreeing therefore to view Nirvana as extinction. It is

indeed to him the opposite of existence, of being; but may

not that opposite be beyond and above existence, rather than

beneath ? The Buddhist simply does not know the meaning

of Nirvana, and does not believe either you or himself capable

of phrasing it in human speech.

Was all this the actual teaching of Prince Siddhartha, the

Buddha? We do not know; because his words were not

written down during his life, and we can not be sure how

much of modern Buddhism is a development grown beyond

its earliest teacher. What we know of Siddhartha, or rather

what the Buddhist books tell us of him, is briefly this. He

was a prince of the Gotama race ; from which fact he is more

commonly called by his tribal name, Gotama. He was surrounded

in youth by all the luxury of princehood; but like

the imaginary prince in Dr. Johnson's celebrated tale of

Rasselas, so, too, Gotama looked beyond his own pleasures

and saw the miseries of humanity. He resolved to devote

himself to seeking the cause and the remedy for all this bitter

grief and hideous suffering. Fleeing from his life of ease,

he spent years in solitude and austerity and deep meditation.

Thus at last he freed himself from all human weakness and

attained his Buddhahood.

Legend tells that all the evil influences and evil spirits of

the world strove to thwart Gotama's final effort to pierce to

the very center of all knowledge. His concentration of

thought was a mighty battle, which is told with all the metaphors

of strife. He won his victory of meditation while

seated under a sacred tree, called the bo-tree; and this tree

has ever since been an object of worship to the Buddhists.

Sprouts sprung from it, or from its descendant bo-trees, are

still preserved and honored.

Having attained his Buddhahood, Gotama went forth to

save his followers from the heavy

" wheel of life," by teaching

them his wisdom. Everywhere they listened and

accepted. Spirits as well as men hung upon his words rejoicing,

and he converted thousands upon thousands. His

death came after more than forty years of teaching; and

then his followers gathered in a great council to formulate

and exactly define what they should continue to announce as

Buddha's doctrine.

All of this story depends on later evidence. The Buddhist

teaching was handed down only by word of mouth for

centuries. Then some two hundred years after Gotama's

death there was in India a powerful king or emperor, Asoka

(about 267-233 B.C.). Asoka is said to have ruled all India,

to have been at first opposed to Buddhism, but to have finally

accepted it and facilitated its spread, not by force, but by

sending out many teachers, so that all India adopted the

faith. Thus Asoka did for Buddhism what the Emperor

Constantine did for Christianity made it the State

religion of a vast empire.

With this event, we come upon the earliest literature of

Buddhism. Asoka proclaimed edicts favoring the religion,

and he had these edicts carved on rock-faced cliffs or on State

pillars set up throughout his domains. Several of these

ancient inscriptions with their long-forgotten commands have

been recently rediscovered, empty echoes of an imperial

power once as absolute as it seemed eternal. Their

translation opens our volume.

Even in Asoka's time, however, there seems to have been

no Buddhist books. He called another council to determine

anew the exact doctrines of the faith; and perhaps all our

present Buddhist Scriptures were then agreed on orally.

That is, they had been previously known, and the " canon "

was now fixed or made unchangeable ; no more teachings were

to be accepted as sacred. But we have reason to believe that

none of these accepted doctrines or books was ever written

down until almost two centuries after Asoka.

The first setback to Indian Buddhism occurred about the

beginning of the Christian era, when there was a schism, the

church separating into the Lesser Vehicle, or conservative

faith, and the Greater Vehicle, or newer teaching, which

looked beyond the actual words of Gotama. This Greater

Vehicle seems to have contained more, or at least emphasized

more, of the spiritual side of the religion. So that many

Christians have thought that this later Buddhism learned

and borrowed much from Christianity. Positive proof of

such borrowing is no longer to be had, but the similarity of

the two faiths is marked. They narrate several similar incidents;

and the doctrines of Buddha parallel those of early

Christianity on at least two important points. Buddhism

teaches that, to attain a higher state beyond this, man must

deliberately and firmly turn away from the pleasures and

sensations of this world, and it insists on kindliness toward

every living thing. A Buddhist monk will not even kill an

insect that annoys him, but will gently remove it from his

person. This universal kindliness differs from the Christian

teaching of universal love only by its lack of warmth. Love

is too intense a feeling to accompany the Buddhist doctrine

of the suppression of human passions.

It was the missionaries of the Greater Vehicle, or more

modern Buddhism, who spread their teachings through China

in the early centuries of the Christian era. In India the

faith declined slowly. For many centuries it existed side by

side with Brahmanism. The two faiths both were tolerant,

and indeed they had so much in common that a believer might

well accept both. But gradually the more sensuous character

of Brahmanism drew the mass of the people away from

the stern, ascetic Buddhism. Then came the Mohammedan

conquest of India, and Mohammedan fanaticism completely

crushed the last remnants of the fading Buddhism in its

birthland. To-day it still holds some place in the hill countries

north of Hindustan, and in Ceylon to the southward.

From Ceylon it spread to all Indo-China in about the sixth

century A.D., and a little later it spread from China to Japan.

It probably spread northward at an even earlier date, from

India into Tibet and Turkestan and Mongolia.

Turn now to the Buddhist literature. The Buddhist

Scriptures consist of three collections called the Three Baskets,

or Ti-pitaka. These were originally, no doubt, written

in India ; but since the faith perished in India we have been

compelled to seek the Ti-pitaka in other lands. The most

complete and probably the oldest versions of these Buddhist

Scriptures have been found in Ceylon. They are in the Pali

tongue, a dialect which was once the common speech of northern

India as opposed to the learned Sanskrit in which the

Vedas, or holy books of Brahmanism, were composed. Thus

it may be that Buddha deliberately chose to proclaim his

teaching in the common tongue, to aid the unlearned rather

than the learned, to reach the masses rather than the brahmin

priests. Versions of several of the Buddhist books, however,

exist also in Sanskrit, in Burmese, in Chinese, and in other

languages ; and our scholars are still studying and comparing

the many differing forms of the faith. Among the Ti-pitaka

only one section, or Basket, has much interest for the outside

world, as the other two are later collections, consisting either

of mere Driestly rules and ceremonials or of abstract metaphysical

speculations. The first Pitaka, on the contrary,

contains a most remarkable mass of historical anecdotes

about Buddha and his disciples, their teachings and their

parables. These are called the Suttas, or Sacred Sayings.

They would cover perhaps as many pages as our Bible, but

they are much more diverse in character. Moreover, some of

them are held by Buddhists in far higher honor than others,

so that it is easy to guide our readers to the more valued ones.

We give here what seem to be the oldest Suttas, those which

open the very old collection known as the Sutta Nipata.

The Nipata has been called the Rig-Veda of the Buddhists,

that is, the work in which the formation of their doctrines

may be studied. With these we give also the celebrated

Sutta which is honored as containing the concentrated essence

of the early Buddhist doctrines, and which is known as the

Foundation of the Kingdom of Righteousness.

Our volume then presents the most honored of all the historical

Suttas, the Book of the Great Decease. This is, so

far as we know, the earliest account of Gotama's life, or

rather of his death. Thus it holds, for Buddhism, somewhat

the place of our Gospels. ISTo other part of the Buddhist

Scriptures is received by its devotees with quite such reverence

as this Book of the Great Decease. It unquestionably

deserves to be classed among the great books of the world, and

no man should assume that he understands Buddhism, or even

that he understands Asia, until he has read this gently wise

and simple account of the passing of the great sage, of the

man who had risen to be almost a god, or at least was believed

to hold the power of a god over the things of the world which

he was leaving. There are indeed what we would call

" miracles" described in the Great Decease, but these are little

more than metaphors. They are but the husk, the shell to

enclose the kernel of Buddha's teaching.

Later Buddhist writings dwelt, perhaps unfortunately,

far more on the miraculous side of Buddha's career. The

sage becomes lost in the magician; the love, in the power.

In order that the reader may follow the development of the

Buddhist faith we give, after the Great Decease, the most

celebrated later accounts of Buddha's life. These could not

much change the story of his death that had been fixed by

the Great Decease ; but they revel in the marvels of his early

life and of his victorious struggle toward Buddhaship. They

will show us, too, the development of the new religion outside

of India. So we give these opening chapters first from the

celebrated Chinese " Life of Buddha " which was translated

into Chinese about A.D. 400 from the work of the famous

Buddhist missionary Asvaghosha. Then we give the accepted

Burmese " life," which is of still later though uncertain

date, and in which the man Gotama has become wholly

lost amid the truly Asiatic maze of fantasy. Then follows

the brief but very noteworthy song which Buddhist tradition

has established as being the old and eternally recurring

" birth song

" which each Buddha chants in celebration at the

moment of his enlightenment.

Any account of Buddhist literature or Buddhist thought

would be hopelessly incomplete if it did not also include

something of the Jatakas, or birth-tales, to which the next

section of our volume is devoted. These are included among

the Suttas as being sacred teachings, yet they are really

beast-fables. Just such stories had been told in India long

before Buddhism arose, yet in the increasingly fantastic

spirit of the new faith they were at some time, perhaps even

as early as King Asoka's day, accepted as being holy. They

were associated with Buddha through the doctrine of transmigration,

and were represented as being tales told by him of

his previous "births

"in the lower forms of life. Hence they are called

"birth-tales."

Having thus presented the life of Buddha from every side,

v:e turn next to the later doctrines of Buddhism, its finally

accepted preaching. This we find at its richest and clearest

in the best known of all the later Suttas, the celebrated

Dhammapada, which is here given in full. The name comes

from dhamma, which means " law." So the book is the Great

Law of Buddhism. We then close our volume with some

quotations from the other most noted later Suttas.

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CONTENTS OF VOLUME X

BUDDHIST LITERATURE

INTRODUCTION: The Most Widespread Aryan Teaching in the World

I. THE EDICTS OF ASOKA (250 B.C.)

II. THE EARLIEST SUTTAS OR SACRED SAYINGS (480 B.C.?) 23

The Snake Sutta 28

The Rich Man Sutta 31

The Rhinoceros Sutta 34

The Foundation of the Kingdom of Righteousness 41 4-

III. THE BOOK OF THE GREAT DECEASE, the earliest

account of Buddha's life (300 B.C.?) ... 49 4

IV. LATER LEGENDS OF THE LIFE OF GOTAMA, THE BUDDHA 145

The Chinese Biography (400 A.D.) .... 149

The Burmese Biography (1300 A.D.?) ... 205

The Buddha Song of Awakening 290

V. THE JATAKA OR BIRTH TALES, THE FAMOUS

BEAST-FABLES OF THE LIFE OF BUDDHA (70 B.C.?) 291

The Strider over Battlefields 294

The Red-fish 299

Birth Stories from the Burmese 304

VI. THE DHAMMAPADA OR PATH OF THE LAW, the most

celebrated of Buddhist teachings (70 B.C.?) . 313

VII. LATER TEACHINGS 355

The Great King of Glory . 359

The Way of Purity . . . . . . . . .389

BIBLIOGRAPHY   401

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