Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 25, 2025
The Cullavagga is similar in construction but less connected in style . The Vinaya contains several important and curious narratives and is a mine of information about the social conditions of ancient India, but much of it has the same literary value as the book of Leviticus. Of greater general interest is the Sutta Pitaka, in which the sermons and discourses of the Buddha are collected.
We know less about these sects than we could wish, but two lists of schools or theories are preserved, one in the Brahmajâla Sutta where the Buddha himself criticises 62 erroneous views and another in Jain literature , which enumerates no fewer than 363.
But the Sutta Pitaka is an attempt to delineate a personality as well as to record a doctrine.
Still, though the essence of the doctrine may be detachable from miracles and even be scientific, one cannot read very far in the Vinaya or the Sutta Pitaka without coming upon unearthly beings or supernatural occurrences. The credibility of miracles is to my mind simply a question of evidence.
In the Vinaya we hear of people who know special books: of monks who are preachers of the Dhamma and others who know the Sutta: of laymen who have learnt a particular suttanta and are afraid it will fall into oblivion unless others learn it from them.
The Buddha is now eighty years of age, and in the Maha-paranibbana Sutta the tale of his migrations and preachings is carried on according to the same scheme as in the accounts of his early days. During the rainy season, however, when he has reached the age of eighty, he has an illness, and sees he cannot live long.
The canon is often known by the name of Tripiṭaka or Three Baskets. When an excavation was made in ancient India it was the custom to pass up the earth in baskets along a line of workmen and the metaphorical use of the word seems to be taken from this practice and to signify transmission by tradition. The three Pitakas are known as Vinaya, Sutta, and Abhidhamma.
No connected account of his renunciation of the world has been found in the Pitakas but people are represented as saying that in spite of his parents' grief he "went out from the household life into the homeless state" while still a young man. Accepted tradition, confirmed by the Mahâparinibbâna Sutta, says that he retired from worldly life when he was twenty-nine years old.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking