The Two Ends and the Middle Way A Suggested Reconstruction

Extract

Of the five opportunities given me these thirty-nine years for such a talk on such an occasion as this, the present one may well be the last. I have on these occasions considered, in the Buddhist field, Women, the Will, Natural Causation, and the Man as Real. I would now say a few words on that which is, historically speaking, the most central subject of all—the subject which is, by general assent, within and without that religion, the New Word with which it was introduced, the first Mantra recorded as of the Founder of it, the so-called Benares ‘sermon’. For we may talk much about legends of him on the one hand, or about the many ways in which his teaching expanded at later periods, in so-called philosophy and in this and that word-value, obscuring the man-value, but the one thing of chief historical importance is and remains the Mantras he first uttered as teacher, and their significance in the religious history of the there and then. To this I would add, in the pertinent phrase of a recent synoptical narrative, “the meaning which these will have had in the mind of their original author.”