E.H. Brewster - The Life of Gotama the Buddha

BUDDHISM
In 16 Volumes

First published in 1926 by
Routledge, Trench, Trbner & Co Ltd

Reprinted in 2000 by
Routledge
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Transferred to Digital Printing 2007

First issued in paperback 2013

1926 E H Brewster

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
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is available from the British Library

ISBN13: 978-0-415-24474-9 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-84564-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-136-37748-8 (ePub)

To

PROF. T. W. RHYS DAVIDS

and

MRS. C. A. F. RHYS DAVIDS

whose translations and expositions

of the Pali Canon

have made this work possible,

it is gratefully dedicated

by

E. H. B.

PART I
THE EARLIEST YEARS

PART II
DISCIPLINE AND ENLIGHTENMENT

PART III
FIRST EVENTS AFTER THE ENLIGHTENMENT

The Buddha enjoys the Bliss of Emancipation
Under the Bodhi Tree he meditates on the Chain of Causation

PART IV
THE BUDDHAS RELATION WITH HIS DISCIPLES AND OTHERS

PART V
LAST EVENTS IN THE LIFE OF THE BUDDHA

I T is at the request of my good friend Earl Brewster that I write these lines as sponsor to his book. Two years ago I suggested he should undertake it. Henry Warrens worthy Buddhism in Translations .was, in its materials, too much of a chronological hash to be a safe guide to the general reader. And it covers too wide a field to secure high relief for the special theme which this book seeks to word. It has been no small pleasure to have witnessed, and now and then helped forward the accomplishment of the task.

None of us but must feel a profound regret that when, after the death of their great leader, the Buddhist monkcommunity, as their records tell, sought to collect in some fixed order and oral form, their common stock of rules and of remembered sayings, they did not make it of equally prime importance to do as much for the story of his whole last life on earth. That we must now piece together scraps of biography and autobiography embedded in those rules and those sayings is the only way left us to make good that negligence. This piecing-together is the aim of the author.

But it were futile to lament over what is lost. There is enough in what we have to form a picture of the man who was, in his life and in his faith, the faith, namely, that true religion lay in the way of daily life growing into noble worth, a very brother-man to men. And we trust that for the readers of these passages such a man will shine forth. I would ask those readers to bear in mind three points :the picture etched here of Gotamas little world, the winnowing that is necessary as we read, and the picture of the real man that our winnowing yields.

First then, the world about him. A religious teacher and reformer of those days in India was bound to work largely with and on the world of the professionally religious. And I am glad that the compiler has worded these as monks .

Bhikkhu means almsman. But monk is, in what it calls up for us, nearer the truth. It is nearer the truth than brethren , much nearer the truth than priests . In monks we have at least the very clue to the world in which the books cited from came to be. We only hide that world when we use other words. It is a world which does not take as its forward view and ideal the value of life as such. The monk has turned his back on life as growth in the world . He is cultivating a special, restricted quality of growth. If he be of other creeds he looks, it may be, to growth less hampered when earth life is over. But the Buddhist monk saw growth in no worlds beyond earth. He only saw, here or there, a cutting-off of coming-to-be. This cutting off might be here and now, it might be in some other world. If he was in the way to his highest good, he was not as a vigorous growing tree. He was a rotting tree. If he was at the close of that way, he was as a tree-stump with severed roots. He did not believe in the growth of mans life taken as whole. He had a vista of many lives, of many worlds, but he threw away much of the teaching that lay therein.

Now how far do we get a true picture of the founder of Buddhism when we picture him in this monk-world? Was he wholly of it, or was he not wholly of it ? Here it is that we must try to winnow wheat from chaff. It is a difficult task, but we must do it, else we come to wrong conclusions. Every reader should do it, for it is only the writer of a romance who will so serve up the past as to bear the readers imagination passively along. And let him not shrink from charges of eclecticism , of winnowing out only what does not appeal to him, Let him seek the very man, the live, the heard, the seen, the fellow man . Let him dwell less on the externals, the imputed speech belonging to that place, that time. So reading he may be surprised to find how much towards a real man these little passages yield wherein at first stands so dim a figure. We have here a very man if we will work him out. Out, that is, from much chaff. Without winnowing, we might conclude he was a mighty talker. But whereas it was a set opening to countless clerical sermons to make them word of the Buddha , the more living interviews show him working a great effect by very few words. In the little Nakulapitar Sutta (p. 121) an instance is given. But in the scriptures, when that ailing man has left the teachers magnetic presence braced and cheered, he is intercepted by disciples, who are made to explain with much formula-talk what the teacher really meant! Was it perhaps thus that the formula-talks came gradually to be put into the mouth of the man of the few winged words ? We must not forget that he was as noted for his silence, as for his words, and that he was known as one who was wont to sit in the noble silence with his disciples, as others did not.