Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/424

 404 Reviews.

is perhaps even more valuable and interesting. It is a translation by Prof. Rhys Davids, whose previous studies in the literature of early Buddhism have opened up a new chapter in the history of the development of religion to English readers, of what are known as the Digha and Magghima Nikayas, forming an exposition of what the early Buddhists considered the teaching of the Buddha to have been. On the question of the date of these dialogues, the translator, following Hofrath Dr. Biihler, assigns them to the fifth or probably the sixth century B.C. They thus form a very early attempt to construct a popular system of theology and psychology. They are framed on what we are accustomed to call the Socratic method. The Buddha, like other Indian teachers of his time, taught by conversation and embodied his doctrines in SiJtras or set phrases, which in the absence of a written literature was the only practical method of preserving and communicating opinion. They are framed much in the Platonic manner in the form of a dialogue between the Master and one of his disciples. The disciple is encouraged to suggest some religious or psycho- logical problem : the Master by a series of ingenious questions and suggestions gradually involves him in a fallacy, and finally points out his errors and explains the manner in which it is pos- sible to attain the truth.

All these dialogues demand attentive study, and here I can only briefly indicate the method which characterises them.

Thus, in the first or Brahma-gala Sutta, we have a discussion and refutation of various animistic views of the soul, which assume it to be a sort of subtle mannikin inside the body, but separate from it, and continuing, after it leaves the body, as a separate entity. " All such speculation is condemned. And necessarily so, since the Buddhist philosophy is put together without this ancient idea of soul." The second, or the Samanna-phala Sutta, supplies the Teacher's justification of the foundation of his Order and the laws by which life in the Order is regulated. The third, or the Ambattha Sutta, is one of those which deal with the problem of caste and in particular wath the pretensions of the Brahmans, a most interesting contribution to our knowledge of the historical development of that great social institution which has so profoundly influenced the progress of Hindu society. This is followed by the Sonadanda Sutta, which investigates the essen- tial quality which makes a man a Brahman, and by the fifth, or