For forty-five years the Buddha journeyed from place to place, preaching and teaching. He founded an order of monks and nuns, and won many converts. He lived to be eighty years old. Missionaries carried his teachings from India to Ceylon and Burma and China and Tibet and Japan. In a few hundred years the religion of the Buddha had spread over the whole of Asia. Hundreds of millions of human beings have accepted his teachings.
In at least two respects, the teachings of the Buddha were quite remarkable. In the first place, he insisted on the virtue of moderation. He urged upon his hearers to avoid the two extremes of a life devoted to fasting and self-torture, and a life of self-indulgence. In the second place, he taught that a man must love his neighbor as himself, returning good for evil and love for hatred. But this was not all. He taught men to love all living creatures without respect of kind or person. He taught men not to injure or kill any living creature, whether a human being or an animal, even in self-defense. All war, according to the teaching of the Buddha, is unholy.
In the course of time it came to be believed that Gotama had become Buddha as the fruit of good deeds performed in countless previous states of existence, especially deeds of generosity. At any time, had he so desired, he might have uprooted craving for worldly pleasures and life and riches by meditation, and thus have escaped the sufferings of repeated states of existence. But this he deemed an unworthy course. Out of pity and compassion and friendliness for living creatures, he preferred to be reborn again and again, to suffer and to die again and again, in order that, by the accumulated merit of good works, he might himself become enlightened and thus be able to enlighten others.
In comparison with the career of the Future Buddha, devoted to the performance of good works, unselfish, generous to the point of sacrificing his own body and blood,—the career of the monk, isolated from the world, selfish, seeking by meditation to uproot craving for worldly pleasures and life and riches, seemed low and mean. The disciple began to imitate his Master. Thus began the Higher Career or Vehicle of Mahāyāna or Catholic Buddhism, as distinguished from the Lower Career or Vehicle of the more primitive Hīnayāna Buddhism of the Pāli texts. Thus did the quest of Buddhahood supplant the quest of Nibbāna. This development took place long before the beginning of the Christian era.
Gotama Buddha made frequent use of similes, allegories, parables, fables, and other stories, to illustrate his teachings. His example was imitated by his followers, and in the course of time hundreds and hundreds of stories were attributed to him on general principles. Most of these stories were, in their original form, nothing but simple folk-tales, many of them of great antiquity. Parallels and variants are found in the Mahābhārata, the Panchatantra, Bidpai’s Fables, the Hitopadesha, the Kathāsaritsāgara, and other fiction-collections, especially those of the Jains.
Of the twenty-six stories contained in this book, of eight of which two versions are given, eleven stories or versions of stories (6, 11, 12, 13, 16, 17 a, 18 a, 19 a, 20 a, 23 a, 24 a) are taken from the oldest canonical texts of the Buddhist Sacred Scriptures. Of these eleven stories, the first nine are said to have been related by Gotama himself, the last two being attributed to the Buddhist sage Kumāra Kassapa. It is highly probable that the tradition embodied in the texts regarding these eleven stories is correct. We may therefore feel quite certain that such remarkable parables as Brahmadatta and the prince (6), Blind men and elephant (13), and The birds (16) were actually related by Gotama himself, in substantially the same form as that in which we now have them. It is not at all unlikely that such a parable as Brahmadatta and Mallika (8) was also related by Gotama, but of this we cannot be certain.
The approximate date of these old canonical texts is now well established. Numerous references to the Buddhist Scriptures in the Bhābrā edict of Asoka, about 250 B.C., and in the canonical work Kathāvatthu, of about the same date, amply justify the statement that the texts from which these eleven stories are taken are, in their present form, at least three or four centuries anterior to the Christian era. It may interest the reader to know that these texts, originating in North India in the lifetime of Gotama, were handed down by oral tradition for many generations, were reduced to canonical form within a century or two of the death of Gotama, were carried to Ceylon in the third century B.C., were written down for the first time in the first century B.C., and were copied and recopied on palm-leaves by successive generations of scribes until comparatively recent times.
The rest of the stories (except 25 and 26) are taken from the Book of the Buddha’s Previous Existences or Jātaka Book. This remarkable work, which also originated in North India, relates in mixed prose and verse the experiences of the Future Buddha in each of 550 states of existence previous to his rebirth as Gotama. The received text of this work represents a recension made in Ceylon early in the fifth century A.D., but much of the material is demonstrably many centuries older. For example, the stanzas rank as canonical Scripture, older versions of some of the stories occur in the canonical texts, and many of the stories (including 4 and 7 and 22) are illustrated by Bharahat sculptures of the third century B.C. Stories 25 and 26 are also Jātaka tales, adapted from C. H. Tawney’s translation of the Kathāsaritsāgara.