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Updated: May 25, 2025
In describing the progress to it we all—whether Indians or Europeans—necessarily use such words as better, higher, happier, but in truth it is not to be expressed in terms of such values. In an interesting sutta a Jain argues that happiness is the goal of life.
This narrative is repeated in an amplified form in the Sutta and Jâtaka called Mahâsudassana, in which the Buddha is said to have been that king in a previous birth. Kusinârâ was at that time one of the capitals of the Mallas, who were an aristocratic republic like the Sâkyas and Vajjians. At the Buddha's command Ânanda went to the Council hall and summoned the people.
He mentions all five Nikâyas by name, the titles of many suttas and also the Vibhanga, Dhâtu-kathâ, Puggala-Paññatti, Kathâ-vatthu, Yamaka and Paṭṭhâna. Everything indicates and nothing discredits the conclusion that this canon of the Vibhajjavâdins was substantially fixed in the time of Asoka, so far as the Vinaya and Sutta Pitakas are concerned.
Yet in the Khuddaka-pâṭha , which if not a very early work is still part of the Sutta Pitaka, are found some curious and pathetic verses describing how the spirits of the departed wait by walls and crossways and at the doors, hoping to receive offerings of food. When they receive it their hearts are gladdened and they wish their relatives prosperity.
It professes to give the conversation of Buddha, who died five hundred and forty-three years before Christ lived on earth; and these utterances are believed by scholars to have been brought together at least more than two hundred years before the Christian era. The Mahámangala Sutta, of the Nipata Sutta, says, for example: 'Thus it was heard by me.
The word commonly used to signify an individual is puggalo. Thus in one sutta the Buddha preaches of the burden, the bearer of the burden, taking it up and laying it down. The burden is the five skandhas and the bearer is the individual or puggalo. This, if pressed, implies that there is a personality apart from the skandhas which has to bear them.
The man would never learn all that, because he would die first." "Therefore" is the conclusion, "hold what I have determined as determined and what I have not determined, as not determined." This sutta may be taken in connection with passages asserting that the Buddha knows more than he tells his disciples.
Shortly afterwards in the same sutta he even more emphatically says that he does not teach annihilation. Though the Buddha seems to condemn by anticipation the form of the Vedanta known as the Advaita, this philosophy illustrates the difficulty of making any statement about the saint after his death.
We may imagine that the death of the mother is due to the historical fact that Gotama's mother did so die, while the other circumstances are embellishments of the old Buddha and Mahâpurusha legend. But the construction of this sutta is curious. The monks in the Jetavana are talking of the wondrous powers possessed by Buddhas. Gotama enters and asks what is the subject of their discourse.
The rugged and popular language of these stanzas which reject speculation as much as luxury, takes us back to the life of the wanderers who followed the Buddha on his tours and we may imagine that poems like the Dhaniya sutta would be recited when they met together in a rest-house or grove set apart for their use on the outskirts of a village.
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