Page:Sacred Books of the Buddhists Vol 1.djvu/19

 the Buddha as he existed at any and at every time; and from a moral point of view, the enlightened meant the good, the perfect man. We must not suppose that his hearers were expected to believe, in our sense of the word, all the circumstances of his former existences as told by Buddha Sâkya-muni. Even for an Indian imagination it would have been hard to accept them as matters of fact. A Gâtaka was not much more than what a parable is with us, and as little as Christians are expected to accept the story of Lazarus resting in Abraham's bosom as a matter of fact (though, I believe, the house of Dives is shown at Jerusalem) were the Buddhists bound to believe that Buddha as an individual or as an historical person, had formerly been a crow or a hare. The views of the Buddhists on the world and its temporary tenants, whether men, animals, or trees, are totally different from our own, though we know how even among ourselves the theories of heredity have led some philosophers to hold that we, or our ancestors, existed at one time in an animal, and why not in a vegetable or mineral state. It is difficult for us to enter fully into the Buddhist views of the world; I would only warn my readers that they must not imagine that highly educated men among the Buddhists were so silly as to accept the Gâtakas as ancient history.

It would be more correct, I believe, to look upon these Birth-stories as homilies used for educational purposes and for inculcating the moral lessons of Buddhism. This is clearly implied in the remarks at the end of certain Gâtakas, such as 'This story is also to be used when discoursing on the Buddha' (p. 148), or 'This story may be used with the object of showing the difficulty of finding companions for a religious life' (p. 172). We know that Christian divines also made use of popular stories for similar purposes. In India many of these stories must have existed long before the rise of Buddhism, as they exist even now, in the memory of the people. It is known how some of them reached Greece and Rome and the Western world