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Updated: June 14, 2025
Rhys Davids has well compared them to Paradise Regained, but the supernatural element is, after the Indian fashion, more ornate. The reader will perhaps ask what are the documents describing Gotama's sayings and doings and what warrant we have for trusting them.
So far as our meagre traditions allow us to trace the development of the two, the differences are even more fundamental. Peaceful as was the latter part of Gotama's life, the beginning was a period of struggle and disillusion.
The citizens and inhabitants of the provinces, desirous of seeing Dhritarashtra, followed the king on diverse kinds of conveyances. The preceptor Kripa also, of Gotama's race, that great leader of forces, taking all the forces with him, proceeded, at the command of the king, towards the old monarch's retreat.
This taste was not destroyed by Gotama's dicta as to the limits of profitable knowledge nor did new deities arouse hostility because they were not mentioned in the ancient scriptures. The development of Brahmanism and Buddhism was parallel: if an attractive novelty appeared in one, something like it was soon provided by the other.
These two together with four other young Sâkya nobles and Upâli joined the order twenty-five years before Gotama's death and perhaps formed an inner circle of trusted relatives, though we have no reason to think there was any friction between them and Brahmans like Sâriputta. Upâli is said to have been barber of the Sâkyas.
They refer incidentally to Gotama's previous births but their interest clearly centres in his last existence. They not infrequently use the word Bodhisattva to describe the youthful Gotama or some other Buddha before the attainment of Buddhahood, but in later literature it commonly designates a being now existing who will be a Buddha in the future.
The son of Gotama's daughter, then addressing the Panchalas and the Kaikeyas, said unto them, "Ye mighty car-warriors, strike ye all at my body. Displaying your lightness in the use of arms, fight ye with me coolly." Thus addressed by him, all those combatants, O king, poured showers of weapons upon Drona's son like clouds pouring torrents of rain.
On his last journey the Buddha is represented as following this route but he died at the seventh stopping-place, Kusinârâ. When at Pâṭaligâma, he prophesied that it would become a great emporium . He was honourably entertained by the officers of the King who decided that the gate and ferry by which he left should be called Gotama's gate and Gotama's ferry.
We shall probably not be transgressing the limits of Gotama's thought if we add that those who are not arhats are bound to approach the question with misconception and it is a necessary part of an Arhat's training to get rid of the idea "I am ." The state of a Saint after death cannot be legitimately described in language which suggests that it is a fuller and deeper mode of life . Yet it is clear that nearly all who dispute about it wish to make out that it is a state they could somehow regard with active satisfaction.
Breathing heavily, he then addressed me, saying, "Alas, I who had Santanu's son Bhishma for my protector, and Karna, that foremost of all wielders of weapons and Gotama's son, Shakuni, and Drona, that first of all wielders of arms, and Ashvatthama, and the heroic Shalya, and Kritavarma, alas, even I have come to this plight! It seems that Time is irresistible!
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