Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 11.djvu/29

Rh which he dwelt, and he is more probably correct, than not, in the assertion I have quoted. It would follow that the Buddhist Scriptures were, till then, handed down by word of mouth only; and no one who is acquainted with the wonderful powers of memory possessed by Indian priests, who can devote their whole lives to the task of acquiring and repeating their sacred books by heart, will doubt for a moment the possibility of this having been the case.

Two methods were adopted in India to aid this power of memory. One, adopted chiefly by the grammarians, was to clothe the rules to be remembered in very short enigmatical phrases (called  or threads), which taxed the memory but little, while they required elaborate commentaries to render them intelligible. The other, the method adopted in the Buddhist writings (both  and   ), was, firstly, the use of stock phrases, of which the commencement once given, the remainder followed as a matter of course; and secondly, the habit of repeating whole sentences, or even paragraphs, which in our modern books would be understood or inferred, instead of being expressed.

The stock phrases, which must be distinguished from the repetitions, belong certainly to a very early period of Buddhism, and many of them recur in Sanskrit as well as in Pâli texts. One result of these numerous repetitions of phrases and paragraphs is that the preservation of the text, when, once established, was rendered very easy; and that mistakes in the MSS. can now be easily rectified when they occur in such repeated passages. To edit the text of such portions of a Pâli Sutta is therefore a comparatively easy task; and it may be said of all the Suttas here translated, that they have thus acquired a valuable protection against that danger of corruption from various readings which often renders uncertain the text of important passages of works written on the very different and simpler system