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Updated: July 2, 2025
But though the Pitakas imply some such idea, they seem to shrink from stating it clearly. They do not emphasize the orderly course of nature or exhort men to live in harmony with it.
But the difference between early and later Buddhism lies in this, that the deities who surround the Buddha in the Pali Pitakas are mere accessories: his teaching would not be affected if they were all removed. But the Bodhisattvas in the Lotus or the Sutra of the Happy Land have a doctrinal significance.
Schopenhauer's doctrine that will is the essential fact in the universe and in life may appear to have analogies to Indian thought: it would be easy for instance to quote passages from the Pitakas showing that taṇhâ, thirst, craving or desire, is the force which makes and remakes the world.
But there is another cause for this tedious peculiarity, namely that for a long period the Pitakas were handed down by oral tradition only. They were first reduced to writing in Ceylon about 20 B.C. in the reign of Vaṭṭagâmani, more than a century and a half after their first importation in an oral form.
We now seem to have reached an ultimate principle and basis, namely, the craving for life which transcends the limits of one existence and finds expression in birth after birth. Many passages in the Pitakas justify the idea that the force which constructs the universe of our experience is an impersonal appetite, analogous to the Will of Schopenhauer.
But determinism, fatalism, and the uselessness of effort formed part of the paradoxical teaching of Makkhali Gosala reported in the Pitakas and therefore well known.
Apprehensions are expressed that suttas will be lost if monks neglect to learn them by heart . From inscriptions of the third century B.C. are quoted words like Petakî, a reciter of the Pitakas or perhaps of one Pitaka: Suttântika and Suttântakinî, a man or woman who recites the suttantas: Pancanekâyika, one who recites the five Nikâyas.
But the central figure remains somewhat aloof; when once he had begun his ministry he laboured uninterruptedly and with continual success, but the foundation of the kingdom of Righteousness seems less like the triumphant issue of a struggle than the passage through the world of some compassionate angel. This is in great part due to the fact that the Pitakas are works of edification.
He has also been compared with St Paul and in so far as both men transformed a provincial sect into a religion for all mankind the parallel is just, but it ends there. St Paul was a constructive theologian. For good or evil he greatly developed and complicated the teaching of Christ, but the Edicts of Asoka if compared with the Pitakas seem to curtail and simplify their doctrines.
This custom, as mentioned, existed in India before the Buddha's time and the Pitakas represent him as adopting it, chiefly out of deference to public opinion.
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