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Updated: June 23, 2025
To these shrines there come to-day, as there have been coming for more than twenty centuries, pilgrims from all lands where Buddha's memory is worshipped, pilgrims not only from Burma, but from Siam, Ceylon, China, and Korea. I shall not soon forget the feeble looks of the old white-haired pilgrim whom two women were helping up the steep ascent as I left the Pagoda after my second visit there.
What he had said to Gotama: his, the Buddha's, treasure and secret was not the teachings, but the unexpressable and not teachable, which he had experienced in the hour of his enlightenment it was nothing but this very thing which he had now gone to experience, what he now began to experience. Now, he had to experience his self.
And although this riot of the imagination offends our ideas of good sense and proportion, the Buddhists do not often lose the distinction between what Matthew Arnold called Literature and Dogma. The Buddha's visits to various heavens are not presented as articles of faith: they are simply a pleasant setting for his discourses.
Subsequent generations forgot this prohibition, but it probably has a historical basis and it indicates the Buddha's desire to make his teaching popular. It is not likely that he contemplated the composition of a body of scriptures.
Not far from these groups, which are divided from the rest by a scarlet barrier of beaters and the flashing chain of their slung horns, arises Monsieur Fontan. The huge merchant and café-owner occupies an intermediate and isolated place between principals and people. His face is disposed in fat white tiers, like a Buddha's belly.
There were wandering monks before the Buddha's time, but the practice of founding establishments where they could reside permanently, originated in his order. Śaṅkara perceived the advantage of the cenobitic life for organizing religion and founded a number of maṭhs or colleges. Subsequent religious leaders imitated him.
Still Hsüan Chuang's long catalogue of deserted monasteries has an unmistakable significance. The decay was most pronounced in the north-west and south. In Gandhara there were only a few Buddhists: more than a thousand monasteries stood untenanted and the Buddha's sacred bowl had vanished. In Takshaśîla the monasteries were numerous but desolate: in Kashmir the people followed a mixed faith.
Two sketches of an elastic Mahayanist Canon of this kind are preserved, one in the Śikshâsamuccaya attributed to Śântideva, who probably flourished in the seventh century, and the other in a little work called the Duration of the Law, reporting a discourse by an otherwise unknown Nandimitra, said to have lived in Ceylon 800 years after the Buddha's death.
Hearing the words and understanding them, he too put off the world's defilement, and gained the eyes of true religion, the reward of a long-planted virtuous cause; and, as one sees by a lamp that comes to hand, so he obtained an unmoved faith in Buddha; and now they both set out for Buddha's presence, with a large crowd of followers.
The Buddha's teaching about these problems is stated with great clearness in a Sutta named after Mâlunkyaputta , an enquirer who visits him and after enumerating them says frankly that he is dissatisfied because the Buddha will not answer them. "If the Lord answers them, I will lead a religious life under him, but if he does not answer them, I will give up religion and return to the world.
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