LECTURE III - THE DHARMA OR LAW AND SCRIPTURES OF BUDDHISM

Summary

Probably most educated persons are aware that Buddhists have their own sacred scriptures, like Hindūs, Pārsīs, Confucianists, Muhammadans, Jews, and Christians. It is not, however, so generally known that in one important particular these Buddhist scriptures, constituting the Tri-piṭaka (p. 61), differ wholly from other sacred books. They lay no claim to supernatural inspiration. Whatever doctrine is found in them was believed to be purely human—that is, was held to be the product of man's own natural faculties working naturally.

The Tri-piṭaka was never like the Veda of the Brāhmans, believed to be the very ‘breath of God’; the same care, therefore, was not taken to preserve every sound; and when at last it was written down the result was a more scholastic production than the Veda.

Moreover, it was not composed in the Sanskṛit of the Veda and Ṡāstras—in the sacred language, the very grammar and alphabet of which were supposed to come from heaven—but in the vernacular of the part of India in which Buddhism flourished. Indeed, it is a significant fact that while the great sages of Sanskṛit literature and philosophy, such as Vyāsa, Kurmārila, and Ṡaṅkara, in all probability spoke and taught in Sanskṛit, the Founder of Buddhism preferred to communicate his precepts to the people in their own vernacular, afterwards called Pāli.