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II.
MAHA-SUDASSANA SUTTA.
289
42. Thus spake the Blessed One; and when the Happy One had thus spoken, once again the Teacher said:
How transient are all component things ! Growth is their nature and decay : They are produced, they are dissolved again: And then is best, when they have sunk to rest?!'
End of the Maha-Sudassana Sutta.
with the repetitions of the Suttas, and confined to the facts of the story.
But I think that no one can read this Sutta in comparison with the short passage found in the Book of the Great Decease (above, pp. 99-101) without feeling that the latter is the more original of the two, and that the legend had not, when the Book of the Great Decease was composed, attained to its present extended form.
We seem therefore really to have three stages of the legend before us, and though the Gâtaka story was actually put into its present shape at a known date (the fifth century of our era) long after the latest possible date for the Book of the Great King of Glory, it has probably preserved for us a reminiscence of what the legend was at the time when the Book of the Great Decease was composed.
1 On this celebrated verse, see the note at Mahaparinibbana Sutta VI, 16, where it is put into the mouth of Sakka, the king of the gods, and the discussion in the Introduction to this Sutta.
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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 |