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Lord Mahavira
I am told three is recorded a conversation between him and one of my followers: one Upali whom I can just remember in this Gautama is shown insisting to Upali that, of the three modes of Karma or deeds, the mode of manas is more effectual in its results on man's life for good or evil than is the mode of bodily action. What I really taught was that bodily action is the vehicle of mind or purpose and in the result of that purpose responds to it I never taught that body was the agent. Here in I have been misrepresented, as is the iate of all teachers of the More. I am not saying that Gautama misrepresented me. It was my disciples who did that. Have you not found yourself it true ...if is the disciple who wounds him worst of all.' (My outlines of Buddhism P. 5 by R. Kipling) ‘The man who values will or Manas will value the More in will in becoming when he realises it this, will take him further still.'
“Very will was with me till the end, but it lay less in austerities, for I had learnt how they shortened our term of usefulness, not had they otherwise compensated me. The notion of Karma was begining to dominate the man of India. He had learnt the motion, not from me, but from the teachers, who saw in deeds done a sort of seed sown, which could not be as plants, rooted out save by tapas, and this was foolish. The better Karma, better actions, were enough to kill the effects of the earlier less worthy Karma, so far as the doer himself was concerned.
I taught this emphasis, but my men were no longer listning to what I taught They saw me weak and ageing, and they tended me as a father who has to see his sons rating him as no longer wiser than they. They honoured me as teacher but they no longer heeded what I said. Their value was in the teacher of a past day, not in the teacher grown wiser of the later years. I hold in worth the teaching that is new. The older teaching may be very true, but it should be valued as something that is in process of becoming I was in good health till one day I had the wish to mandate the men of Vaisali. I went, but I had become weak too weak for the walk-we all walked, holding it amiss to use beasts to draw us. The journey was too much for me and the end came.
Man in his care for animals has gone to strange length. He has had the idea that he might be reborn as one, and that hence it might be well not to treat them unworthily. I never held with this idea, not with the idea that noxious animals should not be killed.
