Vinaya Texts

Author(s): T W Rhys Davids, Hermann Oldenberg
Publisher: Oxford

Page 20

INTRODUCTION.
xvii
and exegetical throughout, containing nothing of a legendary or quasi-historical nature. It is just possible to suggest that it may have originally contained not only such an explanation of the meaning of each Rule, but an account also of the occasion on which the Rule was laid down. But it is difficult to see why greater sacredness should have been attached to one part of the work than to another; or to explain how it was that, if any part was changed, the contradictory passages above referred to were not also altered. Every probability therefore points to the conclusion that we have the complete work still before us, and not fragments of it only.
1.1.
It seems to us to have been precisely the absence of any such historical account in the older Commentary which probably led to the formation of what was practically the new edition of the Pâtimokkha which now lies before us in the first part of the Vinaya Pitaka.
In the earliest books of the Sutta Pitaka, which contains the statement of Buddhist belief, we find—just as in the Gospels and in the Socratic dialogues—that that belief is not stated directly. The books profess to give, not simply the belief itself, but the belief as the Buddha uttered it, with an account of the time when, and the place at which, he uttered it. The Buddha's new method of salvation, his new doctrine of what salvation was, did not present itself to the consciousness of the early Buddhist community as an idea, a doctrine, standing alone, and merely on its own merits. In their minds it was indissolubly bound up with the memory of the revered and striking personality of him who had proclaimed it. So in the Sutta Pitaka the actor and speaker is almost throughout the Buddha himself : (occasionally, but very seldom, one of his disciples.) Introductions-often indeed short and tending in later times to disappear-give a full account of where, and when, he spoke; what was the occasion which led to his uttering that particular speech; and to whom he uttered it. But, throughout, the principal thing is what the Buddha said. It is only natural that this distinguishing mark of the
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