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 cannon, 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
in prose, partly in verse. Two other works, the Lalita Vistara and the Buddha Carita, give us—but this, of course, is later—Sanskrit poems, epics, on the same subject. Of these, the former may be as old as the Christian era; the latter belongs to the 2nd century after Christ. Both of them have been edited and translated. The older one contains still a good deal of prose, the gist of it being often repeated in the verses. The later one is entirely in verse, and shows off the author's mastery of the artificial rules of prosody and poetics, according to which a poem, a mahā-kāvya, ought, according to the later writers on the Ars poetica, to be composed.
These three works deal only quite briefly and incidentally with any point of Buddhism outside of the Buddha legend. Of greater importance for the history of Buddhism are two later works, the Netti Pakarana and the Saddharma Pundarīka. The former, in Pāli, discusses a number of questions then of importance in the Buddhist community; and it relies throughout, as does the Milinda, on the canonical works, which it quotes largely. The latter, in Sanskrit, is the earliest exposition we have of the later Mahāyāna doctrine. Both these books may be dated in the 2nd or 3rd century of our era. The latter has been translated into English. We have now also the text of the Prajnā Pāramitā, a later treatise on the Mahāyāna system, which in time entirely replaced in India the original doctrines. To about the same age belongs also the Divyāvadāna, a collection of legends about the leading disciples of the Buddha, and important members of the order, through the subsequent three centuries. These legends are, however, of different dates, and in spite of the comparatively late period at which it was put into its present form, it contains some very ancient fragments.
The whole of the above works were composed in the north of India; that is to say, either north or a few miles south of the Ganges. The record is at present full of gaps. But we can even now obtain a full and accurate idea of the earliest Buddhism, and are able to trace the main lines of its development through the first eight or nine centuries of its career. The Pāli Text Society is still publishing two volumes a year; and the Russian Academy has inaugurated a series to contain the most important of the Sanskrit works still buried in MS. We have also now accessible in Pāli fourteen volumes of the commentaries of the great 5th-century scholars in south India and Ceylon, most of them the works either of Buddhaghosa of Budh Gaya, or of Dhammapāla of Kāncipura (the ancient name of Conjeeveram). These are full of important historical data on the social, as well as the religious, life of India during the periods of which they treat.
Modern Research.—The striking archaeological discoveries of recent years have both confirmed and added to our knowledge of the earliest period. Pre-eminent among these is the discovery, by Mr William Peppé, on the Birdpur estate, adjoining the boundary between English and Nepalese territory, of the stūpa, or cairn, erected by the Sākiya clan over their share of the ashes from the cremation pyre of the Buddha. About 12 m. to the north-east of this spot has been found an inscribed pillar, put up by Asoka as a record of his visit to the Lumbini Garden, as the place where the future Buddha had been born. Although more than two centuries later than the event to which it refers, this inscription is good evidence of the site of the garden. There had been no interruption of the tradition; and it is probable that the place was then still occupied by the descendants of the possessors in the Buddha's time. North-west of this another Asoka pillar has been discovered, recording his visit to the cairn erected by the Sakyas over the remains of Konāgamana, one of the previous Puddhas or teachers, whose follower Gotama the Buddha had claimed to be. These discoveries definitely determine the district occupied by the Sākiya republic in the 6th and 7th centuries B.C. The boundaries, of course, are not known; but the clan must have spread 30 m. or more along the lower slopes of the Himalayas and 30 m. or more southwards over the plains. It has been abandoned jungle since the 3rd century A.D., or perhaps earlier, so that the ruined sites, numerous through the whole district, have remained undisturbed, and further discoveries may be confidently expected.
The principal points on which this large number of older and better authorities has modified our knowledge are as follows:—
1. We have learnt that the division of Buddhism, originating with Burnouf, into northern and southern, is misleading. He found that the Buddhism in his Pāli MSS., which came from Ceylon, differed from that in his Sanskrit MSS., which came from Nepal. Now that the works he used have been made accessible in printed editions, we find that, wherever the existing MSS. came from, the original works themselves were all composed in the same stretch of country, that is, in the valley of the Ganges. The difference of the opinions expressed in the MSS. is due, not to the place where they are now found, but to the difference of time at which they were originally composed. Not one of the books mentioned above is either northern or southern. They all claim, and rightly claim, to belong, so far as their place of origin is concerned, to the Majjhima Desa, the middle country. It is undesirable to base the main division of our subject on an adventitious circumstance, and especially so when the nomenclature thus introduced (it is not found in the books themselves) cuts right across the true line of division. The use of the terms northern and southern as applied, not to the existing MSS., but to the original books, or to the Buddhism they teach, not only does not help us, it is the source of serious misunderstanding. It inevitably leads careless writers to take for granted that we have, historically, two Buddhisms—one manufactured in Ceylon, the other in Nepal. Now this is admittedly wrong. What we have to consider is Buddhism varying through slight degrees, as the centuries pass by, in almost every book. We may call it one, or we may call it many. What is quite certain is that it is not two. And the most useful distinction to emphasize is, not the ambiguous and misleading geographical one—derived from the places where the modern copies of the MSS. are found; nor even, though that would be better, the linguistic one—but the chronological one. The use, therefore, of the inaccurate and misleading terms northern and southern ought no longer to be followed in scholarly works on Buddhism.
2. Our ideas as to the social conditions that prevailed, during the Buddha's lifetime, in the eastern valley of the Ganges have been modified. The people were divided into clans, many of them governed as republics, more or less aristocratic. In a few cases several of such republics had formed confederations, and in four cases such confederations had already become hereditary monarchies. The right historical analogy is not the state of Germany in the middle ages, but the state of Greece in the time of Socrates. The Sākiyas were still a republic. They had republics for their neighbours on the east and south, but on the western boundary was the kingdom of Kosala, the modern Oudh, which they acknowledged as a suzerain power. The Buddha's father was not a king. There were rājas in the clan, but the word meant at most something like consul or archon. All the four real kings were called Mahā-rāja. And Suddhodana, the teacher's father, was not even rāja. One of his cousins, named Bhaddiya, is styled a rāja; but Suddhodana is spoken of, like other citizens, as Suddhodana the Sākiyan. As the ancient books are very particular on this question of titles, this is decisive.