United States or Saint Lucia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Other important works included in it are the Thera and Therî-gâthâ or poems written by monks and nuns respectively, and the Jâtaka or stories about the Buddha's previous births . Some of the rather miscellaneous contents of this Nikâya are late and do not belong to the same epoch of thought as the discourses attributed to Gotama.
The contents of it are not quite the same in Ceylon, Burma and Siam, and only a small portion of them has been identified in the Chinese Tripitaka. Nevertheless the word pañcanekâyika, one who knows the five Nikâyas, is found in the inscriptions of Sanchi and five Nikâyas are mentioned in the last books of the Cullavagga. Thus a fifth Nikâya of some kind must have been known fairly early.
A remarkable passage is preserved in the Anguttara Nikâya describing his feelings as a young man and may be the origin of the story about the four visions of old age, sickness, death and of peace in the religious life. After describing the wealth and comfort in which he lived , he says that he reflected how people feel repulsion and disgust at the sight of old age, sickness and death.
He is just mentioned in the Dîgha Nikâya and Buddha-Vaṃsa and the Milinda Pañha quotes an utterance of Gotama to the effect that "He will be the leader of thousands as I am of hundreds," but the quotation has not been identified.
Who of you who read these words has not listened to debates and endless discussions as to what even so modern a writer as Emerson or Whitman, or Nietzche or Kobo Daisi, or some other, may have meant by certain statements? In the Samyutta Nikaya we read: "Let a man who holds the Self clear, keep that Self free from wickedness."
The Nikâya or school appears to have been chiefly, though not exclusively, concerned with the rule of discipline which naturally had more importance for Buddhist monks than it has for European scholars. The observances of each Nikâya were laid down in its own recension of the scriptures which was sometimes oral and sometimes in writing.
The suttas of the Dîgha Nikâya in which these lists of deities occur were perhaps composed before 300 B.C. About that date Megasthenes, the Greek envoy at Pataliputra, describes two Indian deities under the names of Dionysus and Herakles. They are generally identified with Kṛishṇa and Śiva.
As early as the Anguttara Nikâya we find references to the danger of a taste for ornate and poetic sutras and these compositions seem to be the outcome of that taste.
The major part of the ideal life, set forth in a recurring passage of the Dîgha Nikâya, consists in the creation of intellectual states, and though the Buddha disavowed all speculative philosophy his discourses are full, if not of metaphysics, at least of psychology. And this knowledge is essential.
Word Of The Day