211 



23. My attempt, then, has been to show, that the moral 

 precepts of Buddha may have grown from relics, or vestiges, 

 of a primitive, divinely-given, law, that still existed by the 

 side of vestiges of divinely appointed religious rites and cere- 

 monies. Whether Gautama Buddha himself held more than 

 these fragments of the past it would be premature yet to say ; 

 but that many of the Buddhistic teachings are stray mosaics 

 that would accurately fit a divine morality, however they came 

 to be so, I think no one will be inclined to deny. 



24. That there may have been, however, much more in the 

 teaching of the actual founder of Buddhism than appears 

 to-day in the Buddhist Scriptures, is quite possible. This 

 thought appears to have struck Dr. Oldenberg with 

 peculiar force. He says, " When we try to resuscitate in 

 our own way and in our own language the thoughts that are 

 embedded in the Buddhist teaching, we can scarcely help 

 forming the impression that it was not a mere idle statement 

 which the sacred texts preserve to us, that the Perfect One 

 knew much more which he thought inadvisable to say, than 

 what he esteemed it profitable to his disciples to unfold. For 

 that which is declared points for its explanation and comple- 

 tion to something else, which is passed over in silence — for it 



'* The wise, who cause no suffering to any being, who keep their body in 

 check, they walk to the everlasting state ; he who has reached that knows 

 no sorrow." 



" He who is permeated by goodness, the monk who adheres to Buddha's 

 teaching, let him turn to the land of peace, where transientness finds an end, - 

 to happiness." (" Dhammapada," 23, 203, 225, 368). 



Why meditation, endurance, wisdom, goodness, purity, love, if the goal of 

 all were annihilation of being ? Could such a prospect as the summum 

 bonum have begotten the moral system of Buddha ? There is no hint in the 

 above extracts (and so in innumerable others) of annihilation of being. 

 Deliverance from the transient is the ground thought. 



The theory of Mr. Childers, though supported by so much learning, " that 

 the word Nirvana was used from the first to designate two different things, 

 the state of blissful sanctification called Arhatship, and the annihilation of 

 existence in which Arhatship ends " (Childers's Pali Dictionary, p. 266), and 

 that, therefore, it has always had the latter for its final meaning, will not 

 stand, I think, the test of future criticism. Nay, Dr. Oldenberg seems 

 already successfully to have set it aside. 



If Gautama Buddha himself taught nothing more definite on the subject 

 of Nirvana than did his disciples, whose words we now read, then it is 

 evident that he must have inherited his method of life without the fulness 

 of its original sanction and source ; and if so, he was not the founder, 

 properly speaking, of a religion, but only the instrtmient for using an already 

 existing morality against the imperfect state of society in which his lot 

 was cast 



