Dhammapada

SR No.: 007674
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Max Muller
Publisher: Oxford
Publication Year: 1881
Total Pages: 2540
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 45 MB

Page 456

INTRODUCTION.
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Order. The Vinaya Pitaka, which enters at so great length into all the details of the daily life of the recluses, has no rules regarding the mode of treating the body of a deceased Bhikkhu. It was probably burnt, and very much in the manner described in the last chapter of our Sutta - that is to say, it was reverently carried out to some convenient spot, and there simply cremated on a funeral pyre without any religious ritual, a small tope being more often than not erected over the ashes. Though funerals are, naturally, not unfrequently mentioned in the historical books, and in the Birth Stories, there is nowhere any reference to a recognised mode of performing any religious ceremony.
The date of the Great Decease is not quite certain. The dwellers in the valley of the Ganges, for many generations after Gotama's death, were a happy people, who had no need of dates; and it was only long afterwards, and in Ceylon, that the great event became used as the startingpoint for chronological calculations, as the Buddhist era.
The earliest use of the Buddha's Parinibbana as such an era is in an Inscription of King Nissanka Malla's, of the twelfth century A.D., published by me in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society for 1875. Both in the historical records of Ceylon, and in those passages of the Puranas which are the nearest approach to historical records in India, the chronology is usually based on the lists of kings, just as it is in the Old Testament. Only by adding together the lengths of the reigns of the intermediate kings is it possible to calculate the length of the time that is said to have elapsed between any two given events.
If these lists of kings had been accurately kept from
Compare Mahavamsa, pp. 4,125, 129, 199, 223-225, and Chap. 39, verse 28; Gataka I, 166, 181, 402; II, 6; Dasaratha Gâtaka, pp. 1, 21, 22, 26, &c.; Dhammapada Commentary, pp. 94, 205, 206, 372, 359; Hatthavana-gallavihâra-vamsa, Chap. IX; Hardy, 'Eastern Monachism,' pp. 322–324.
The words Saddham, Uddhadehikam, and Nivâpo, given in Childers, refer to pagan rites.
On funerals among Buddhists in Japan, see Miss Bird's Unbeaten Tracks,' vol. i.
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