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It is probably correct to say not that the Buddha borrowed from the Sânkhya but that both he and the Sânkhya accepted and elaborated in different ways certain current views. The Pali Suttas mention six agnostic or materialist teachers and give a brief but perhaps not very just compendium of their doctrines.
No passage has yet been adduced from the suttas mentioning more than seven Buddhas but later books, such as the Buddha-vaṃsa and the introduction to the Jâtaka, describe twenty-five . There are twenty-four Jain Tîrthankaras and according to some accounts twenty-four incarnations of Vishnu. Probably all these lists are based on some calculation as to the proper allowance of saints for an aeon.
These correspond fairly well with the Pali text but represent another recension and a somewhat different arrangement. We have therefore here fragments of a Sanskrit version which must have been imported to Central Asia from northern India and covers, so far as the fragments permit us to judge, the same ground as the Vinaya and Suttas of the Pali Canon.
These treatises were probably current as separate portions for recitation before the suttas in which they are now set were composed. Similarly, the Vinaya clearly presupposes an old code in the form of a list of offences called the Pâtimokkha.
The Buddha even praised the ancients because they married for love and did not buy their wives . The right life of a layman is described in several suttas and in all of them, though almsgiving, religious conversation and hearing the law are commended, the main emphasis is on such social virtues as pleasant speech, kindness, temperance, consideration for others and affection.
For long passages such as the tract on morality and the description of progress in the religious life occur in several discourses and the amount of matter common to different Suttas and Nikayas is surprising.
But even in the two older collections, the Dîgha and the Majjhima, we have not reached the lowest stratum. The first thirteen suttantas of the Dîgha all contain a very ancient tractate on morality, and the Sâmaññaphala and following sections of the Dîgha and also some suttas of the Majjhima contain either in whole or in part a treatise on progress in the holy life.
Even more than in the Buddhist suttas there is a tendency to repetition which offends our sense of proportion and though the main idea, to free the soul from the trammels of passion and matter, is not inferior to any of the religious themes of India, the treatment is not adequate to the subject and the counsels of perfection are smothered under a mass of minute precepts about the most unsavoury details of life and culminate in the recommendation of death by voluntary starvation.
The later Buddhists compose nothing in the style of the Nikâyas: they write about Gotama in new and fanciful ways, but no Acts of the Apostles succeed the Gospels. Though the Buddhist suttas are sui generis and mark a new epoch in Indian literature, yet in style they are a natural development of the Upanishads.
I will treat of this question in more detail in a later chapter and here will merely say that the Pali works called Vinaya or monastic rules and Suttas or sermons recount the circumstances in which each rule was laid down and each sermon preached.
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