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Updated: June 14, 2025
For some two centuries after Gotama's death we have little information as to the geographical extension of his doctrine, but some of the Sanskrit versions of the Vinaya represent him as visiting Muttra, North-west India and Kashmir.
When the Vedanta teaches that this changing troubled world is merely the disguise of that unchanging and untroubled state into which saints can pass, it is, I believe, following Gotama's thought, but giving it an expression which he would have considered imperfect. Staël Holstein who also thinks that Kanishka's tribe should be called Kusha not Kushan.
Shortly after Gotama's death, a council of five hundred ecclesiastics assembled for the purpose of settling the religion. A century later a second council met to regulate the monastic institution; and in B.C. 241, a third council, for the expulsion of fire-worshippers.
The Buddhist theory of rebirth is somewhat different, for Buddhism even in its later divagations rarely ceased to profess belief in Gotama's doctrine that there is no such thing as a soul—by which is meant no such thing as a permanent unchanging self or âtman. Buddhists are concerned to show that transmigration is not inconsistent with this denial of the âtman.
"Let old Samanas be content with such feats!" In the town of Savathi, every child knew the name of the exalted Buddha, and every house was prepared to fill the alms-dish of Gotama's disciples, the silently begging ones.
Fie on my covetous self, for whose sake all friends, desirous of making me happy, are themselves vanquished and plunged into grief. Except thee, O son of Gotama's daughter, what foremost of all wielders of weapons of there, what warrior, indeed, equal to Mahadeva himself in battle, that would not, though competent, destroy the foe? O Aswatthaman, be pleased with me and destroy my enemies.
This combination of piety and ambition is perhaps not unnatural. He was a cousin of the Buddha and entered the order at the same time as Ânanda and other young Sâkya nobles. Sprung from that quarrelsome breed he possessed in a distorted form some of Gotama's own ability. He is represented as publicly urging the Master to retire and dwell at ease but met with an absolute refusal.
But so long as the kingdom of Champa existed, Indian culture and Hinduism maintained themselves at least as far north as Hué. The Buddhism of Tibet is a late and startling transformation of Gotama's teaching, but the transformation is due rather to the change and degeneration of that teaching in Bengal than to the admixture of Tibetan ideas.
Indian saints are distinguished by what they said, not by what they did and it is a strong testimony to Gotama's individuality and force of character, that in spite of the centuries which separate us from him and the misty unreal atmosphere which in later times hangs round his name, his personality is more distinct and lifelike than that of many later teachers.
As a youth he grew up in a poor family where the disenchantment of satiety was unknown: his genius first found expression in sermons delivered in the synagogue—the ordinary routine of Jewish ritual: his appearance as a public teacher and his ultimate conviction that he was the Messiah were a natural enlargement of his sphere, not a change of method: the temptation, though it offers analogies to Gotama's mental struggle and particularly to the legends about Mâra, was not an internal revolution in which old beliefs were seen to be false and new knowledge arose from their ashes.
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