Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 11.djvu/24

xviii clearly implied that only one dâgaba, or memorial burial mound, should be erected in honour of a Tathâgata, just as one memorial mound should be erected in honour of a king of kings.

When we recollect that in the first and second, and perhaps in the third century before Christ, dâgabas had already been erected in honour of the Buddha in distant parts of the continent of India, and had rapidly become famous as places of pilgrimage, the reasonable conclusion to be drawn from these passages is that the Book of the Great Decease is older than them all; or, at the least, that it was written before any of them had become famous.

On the other hand, there is evidently an exaggerated belief as to the respect in which the Buddha was held by his contemporaries underlying the concluding and other sections of the book. It is probable enough that Gotama was held in deep respect by the simple people among whom he lived and moved about as a religious teacher any reformer. It may well be that the inhabitants of the village where he died gave him a sort of public funeral. But that the neighbouring clans should have vied one with the other for the possession of his remains is quite inconsistent with the position that he can reasonably be supposed to have held among them. It must have taken some time for this belief to spring up, and be received without question.

In a similar way a considerable interval must have elapsed before the beautiful parable in the last section of Chapter I could have given rise to the belief in the miracle (the solitary miracle ascribed to the Buddha, so far as I know, in the Sutta Pitaka) recorded in the previous section.

So also the comparison drawn between the Buddha and a  or King of Kings in Chapter V, § 37, and Chapter VI, § 33, can scarcely have arisen till the rise of a lord paramount in the valley of the Ganges had familiarised the people with the idea of a Universal Monarch. Now it was either just before or just after the well-known Councils at Vesâli, of which mention has been made above, that that important revolution took place which raised a