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140 FOUNDATION OF KINGDOM OF RIGHTEOUSNESS.
Lalita Vistara differs a good deal in minor details, but is substantially the same as regards the Noble Truths, and the eight divisions of the Noble Path.
A translation of this Sutta, found among Mr. Gogerly's papers after his death, was published in the Journal of the Ceylon Asiatic Society for 1865: and the Journal Asiatique for 1870 contained a translation and full analysis by M. Léon Feer.
It would be difficult to estimate too highly the historical value of this Sutta. There can be no reasonable doubt that the very ancient tradition accepted by all Buddhists as to the substance of the discourse is correct, and that we really have in it a summary of the words in which the great Indian thinker and reformer for the first time successfully promulgated his new ideas. And it presents to us in a few short and pithy sentences the very essence of that remarkable system which has had so profound an influence on the religious history of so large a portion of the human race.
The name given to it by the early Buddhists—the setting in motion onwards of the royal chariot-wheel of the supreme dominion of the Dhamma-means, as I have shown elsewhere, not 'the turning of the wheel of the law,' as it has been usually rendered ; but the inauguration, or foundation, of the Kingdom of Righteousness.'
Is it possible that the praying wheels of Thibet have led to the misapprehension and mistranslation now so common? But who would explain a passage in the New Testament by a superstition current, say, in Spain in the twelfth century? And so when Mr. Da Cunha thinks that the Dhamma is symbolised by the wheel, because 'Gotama ignored the beginning, and was uncertain as to the end?,' he seems to me to be following a vicious method of interpreting such figures of speech. It cannot be disputed that the term wheel' might have implied such an idea as he puts into it. But if we want to know what it did imply, we must be guided wholly by the previous use of the word at the
1 Buddhism,' p. 45.
9. Memoir on the Tooth Relic,' &c., p. 15.
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| SR No. | 007674 |
| Book Title | Dhammapada |
| 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 |