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LONG-DRAWN DISSERTATIONS.
137 mon type of such teaching, and which at that very early age was accepted as the type of his teaching. Unlike the Vedic books, which are in the pure high Sanskrit, the books of Buddhism are in the popular dialect; and in the sayings attributed to Buddha there is no trace of Sanskrit being used. Indeed, he is reported to have given directions that every believer should learn the words of Buddha in his own tongue.
Everything in the Buddhist narratives bears the stamp of an age which had become accustomed to solemn, longdrawn dissertations, and in which people of Long-drawn leisure, or who had abandoned the world, gave dissertations. themselves up to continual speculation on the causes of various phenomena, or of troubles and difficulties. There is no trace of a life like our hurried modern one, in which only the smallest possible time is given to any one thing. With these old Hindus there was always plenty of time if a discussion was on foot, and it must be conducted in an orderly, sober fashion, with due ceremony and full elaboration. The great heat caused a tendency to indolent gravity and long-drawn-out expression. Compression and selection were scarcely attempted. The Upanishads, even if not composed before the Buddhist books, were in existence about the same time, and testify to the widespread spirit of abstraction and philosophising. So that the form of Buddhist teaching was due to the spirit of the more educated among the Hindus, as it had been developed by the Vedic and postVedic literature. Although there is considerable variety in the matter and often much beauty in the illustrations used in the discourses attributed to Buddha, the following gives an idea of a method frequently followed by him.
He is expressing the thought that all the senses and the outer things which they perceive are eaten away by the sorrows and the fleeting nature of mortal affairs. He thus addresses the thousand disciples or monks who were with him. “Then said the Blessed One to the disciples:
Everything, O disciples, is in flames. And what Everything, O disciples, is in flames? The eye, O disciples, is in flames; the visible is in flames; the knowledge of the
