after the earliest period, and upon literary life in the valley of the Ganges in the 4th or 5th century B.C., if we briefly explain what the tractates in this collection contain. The first, the Khuddaka Pātha, is a little tract of only a few pages. After a profession of faith in the Buddha, the doctrine and the order, there follows a paragraph setting out the thirty-four constituents of the human body—bones, blood, nerves and so on—strangely incongruous with what follows. For that is simply a few of the most beautiful poems to be found in the Buddhist scriptures. There is no apparent reason, except their exquisite versification, why these particular pieces should have been here brought together. It is most probable that this tiny volume was simply a sort of first lesson book for young neophytes when they joined the order. In any case that is one of the uses to which it is put at present. The text book is the Dhammapada. Here are brought together from ten to twenty stanzas on each of twenty-six selected points of Buddhist self-training or ethics. There are altogether 423 verses, gathered from various older sources, and strung together without any other internal connexion than that they relate more or less to the same subject. And the collector has not thought it necessary to choose stanzas written in the same metre, or in the same number of lines. We know that the early Christians were accustomed to sing hymns, both in their homes and on the occasions of their meeting together. These hymns are now irretrievably lost. Had some one made a collection of about twenty isolated stanzas, chosen from these hymns, on each of about twenty subjects—such as Faith, Hope, Love, the Converted Man, Times of Trouble, Quiet Days, the Saviour, the Tree of Life, the Sweet Name, the Dove, the King, the Land of Peace, the Joy Unspeakable—we should have a Christian Dhammapada, and very precious such a collection would be. The Buddhist Dhammapada has been edited by Professor Fausböll (2nd ed., 1900), and has been frequently translated. Where the verses deal with those ideas that are common to Christians and Buddhists, the versions are easily intelligible, and some of the stanzas appeal very strongly to the Western sense of religious beauty. Where the stanzas are full of the technical terms of the Buddhist system of self-culture and self-control, it is often impossible, without expansions that spoil the poetry, or learned notes that distract the attention, to convey the full sense of the original. In all these distinctively Buddhist verses the existing translations (of which Professor Max Müller’s is the best known, and Dr Karl Neumann’s the best) are inadequate and sometimes quite erroneous. The connexion in which they were spoken is often apparent in the more ancient books from which these verses have been taken, and has been preserved in the commentary on the work itself.
In the next little work the framework, the whole paraphernalia of the ancient akhyāna, is included in the work itself, which is called Udāna, or “ecstatic utterances.” The Buddha is represented, on various occasions during his long career, to have been so much moved by some event, or speech, or action, that he gave vent, as it were, to his pent-up feelings in a short, ecstatic utterance, couched, for the most part, in one or two lines of poetry. These outbursts, very terse and enigmatic, are charged with religious emotion, and turn often on some subtle point of Arahatship, that is, of the Buddhist ideal of life. The original text has been published by the Pāli Text Society. The little book, a garland of fifty of these gems, has been translated by General Strong. The next work is called the Iti Vuttaka. This contains 120 short passages, each of them leading up to a terse deep saying of the Buddha’s, and introduced, in each case, with the words Iti vuttam Bhagavalā—“thus was it spoken by the Exalted One.” These anecdotes may or may not be historically accurate. It is quite possible that the memory of the early disciples, highly trained as it was, enabled them to preserve a substantially true record of some of these speeches, and of the circumstances in which they were uttered. Some or all of them may also have been invented. In either case they are excellent evidence of the sort of questions on which discussions among the earliest Buddhists must have turned. These ecstatic utterances and deep sayings are attributed to the Buddha himself, and accompanied by the prose framework. There has also been preserved a collection of stanzas ascribed to his leading followers. Of these 107 are brethren, and 73 sisters, in the order. The prose framework is in this case preserved only in the commentary, which also gives biographies of the authors. This work is called the Thera-therī-gāthā.
Another interesting collection is the Jātaka book, a set of verses supposed to have been uttered by the Buddha in some of his previous births. These are really 550 of the folk-tales current in India when the canon was being formed, the only thing Buddhist about them being that the Buddha, in a previous birth, is identified in each case with the hero in the little story. Here again the prose is preserved only in the commentary. And it is a most fortunate chance that this—the oldest, the most complete, and the most authentic collection of folklore extant—has thus been preserved intact to the present day. Many of these stories and fables have wandered to Europe, and are found in medieval homilies, poems and story-books. A full account of this curious migration will be found in the introduction to the present writer’s Buddhist Birth Stories. A translation of the whole book is now published, under the editorship of Professor Cowell, at the Cambridge University Press. The last of these poetical works which it is necessary to mention is the Sutta Nipāta, containing fifty-five poems, all except the last merely short lyrics, many of great beauty. A very ancient commentary on the bulk of these poems has been included in the canon as a separate work. The poems themselves have been translated by Professor Fausböll in the Sacred Books of the East. The above works are our authority for the philosophy and ethics of the earliest Buddhists. We have also a complete statement of the rules of the order in the Vinaya, edited, in five volumes, by Professor Oldenberg. Three volumes of translations of these rules, by him and by the present writer, have also appeared in the Sacred Books of the East.
There have also been added to the canonical books seven works on Abhidhamma, a more elaborate and more classified exposition of the Dhamma or doctrine as set out in the Nikāyas. All these works are later. Only one of them has been translated, the so-called Dhamma Sangani. The introduction to this translation, published under the title of Buddhist Psychology, contains the fullest account that has yet appeared of the psychological conceptions on which Buddhist ethics are throughout based. The translator, Mrs Caroline Rhys Davids, estimates the date of this ancient manual for Buddhist students as the 4th century B.C.
Later Works.—So far the canon, almost all of which is now accessible to readers of Pāli. But a good deal of work is still required before the harvest of historical data contained in these texts shall have been made acceptable to students of philosophy and sociology. These works of the oldest period, the two centuries and a half, between the Buddha’s time and that of Asoka, were followed by a voluminous literature in the following Periods—from Asoka to Kanishka, and from Kanishka to Buddhaghosa,—each of about three centuries. Many of these works are extant in MS.; but only five or six of the more important Have so far been published. Of these the most interesting is the Milinda, one of the earliest historical novels preserved to us. It is mainly religious and philosophical and purports to give the discussion, extending over several days, in which a Buddhist elder named Nāgasena succeeds in converting Milinda, that is Menander, the famous Greek king of Bactria, to Buddhism. The Pāli text has been edited and the work translated into English. More important historically, though greatly inferior in style and ability, is the Mahāvastu or Sublime Story, in Sanskrit. The story is the one of chief importance to the Buddhists—the story, namely, of how the Buddha won, under the Bo Tree, the victory over ignorance, and attained to the Sambodhi, “the higher Wisdom,” of Nirvāna. The story begins with his previous births, in which also he was accumulating the Buddha qualities. And as the Mahāvastu was a standard work of a particular sect, or rather school, called the Mahā-sanghikas, it has thus preserved for us the theory of the Buddha as held outside the followers of the canon, by those whose views developed, in after centuries, into the Mahāyāna or modern form of Buddhism in India. But this book, like all the ancient books, was composed, not in the north, in Nepal, but in the valley of the Ganges, and it is partly
