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LITERATURE
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only seven Buddhas are known; and Játakas, in the technical sense, are not yet thought of. This par. ticular set of Jātakas is also arranged on the basis of the Pärámitás, a doctrine that plays no part in the older books. The Ten Perfections (Pärämitä) are qualities a Buddha is supposed to be obliged to have acquired in the countless series of his previous rebirths as a Bodhisatva. But this is a later notion, not found in the Nikāyas. It gradually grew up as the Bodhisatva idea began to appeal more to the Indian mind. And it is interesting to find already, in these latest of the canonical books, the germs of what afterwards developed into the later Mahāyāna doctrine, to which the decline of Buddhisın, in the opinion of Professor Bhandarkar, was eventually so greatly due.'
This question of the history of the Jātaka stories will be considered in greater detail in our next chapter. What has been here said (and other similar evidence will, no doubt, be hereafter discovered) is amply sufficient to show that some parts of the Canon are later than others; and that the books as we have them contain internal evidence from which conclusions may fairly be drawn as to their comparative age. Such conclusions, of course, are not always so plain as is the case in the four instances—the Peta and Vimāna Vatthus, the Buddha Vamsa, and the Cariyā Pițaka-just considered. For example, let us take the case of the Sutta Nipāta.
This also is a short collection of poems. It contains fifty-four lyrics, each of them very short, ar17. R. A. S., Bombay Branch, 1900, p. 395.
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Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
www.umaragyanbhandar.com
