Bruhat Katha kosha

Author(s): Harishen Acharya,
Publisher: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan

Page 46

INTRODUCTION
iii) Early Buddhist Literature
Throughout Buddhist literature, which is studied more exhaustively and critically than Jaina literature, the personality of Buddha weilds tremendous influence on the reader almost at every context. Buddha is a master-physician who wants to cure man of his miseries by prescribing to him his religious principles. As a successful teacher, he rightly grasped men and their minds; and we learn that he used to tell many amusing and agreeable tales, both instructive and pleasant, which made all beings happy in this and the next world. Illustration has played a remarkable rôle in the Indian mode of thought; and the syllogism necessarily includes an Udaharana. This necessitated the teacher to keep himself wellacquainted with different walks of life from which illustrations were drawn that they might immediately convince the people about the intelligence of the teacher and about the veracity of his preachings. It is quite likely that Buddha included popular tales in his preachings. Pali literature presents abundant evidence that Buddhist monks and preachers profusedly illustrated their sermons with tales of piety, religious suffering, successful penance and the attainment of Arhatship. "They sometimes invented pious legends, but more frequently they took fables, fairy tales, and amusing anecdotes from the rich store-house of popular tales or from secular literature, altering and adapting them for the purpose of religious propaganda. The Bodhisattva dogma, in connection with the doctrines of rebirth and Karma, was an excellent expedient for turning any popular or literary tale into a Buddhist legend". Similes and parables have a great effect on the audience, and they convince the hearer more easily than a legion of abstruse arguments; eminent teachers, therefore, always used them to spice their sermons.
Beginning with the Vinayapitaka, the rules and regulations in the Khandakās are introduced by narratives illustrating the occasion when they were announced by Buddha. In the Cullavagga too we come across many edifying anecdotes: some of them are conversion-stories and some of them deserve to be interwoven either in the life of the Buddha or the Buddhist order. The stories such as those of Sariputta, Moggallana, Mahāpajapati, Upāli, Jivaka etc. have a perennial sociological and psychological interest. In the Dighanikaya and the Majjhimanikaya of the Suttapiṭaka we come across bits of information connected with Buddha's biography. We have dialogues like the Payasisutta, and there are myths and legends which illustrate a doctrine or convey a moral. Stories of Channa, Assalayana etc. have an appearance of some factual occurrence. The tale of the robber Angulimāla who became a monk and reached the status of an Arhat, the legend of king Makhadeva who entered the order of monks at the first appearance of grey hair, and Raṭṭhapala's renunciation and subsequent strictures on the vanity of worldly pleasures-these are some of the fine
1 Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, VII, p. 491.
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