Page:Sagas from the Far East; or, Kalmouk and Mongolian traditionary tales.djvu/263

Rh The simple Sûtra, or colloquies of Shâkjamuni with his disciples, written in masajja, a poetical prose pleasingly broken into a sort of cadence, themselves form a kind of history of the country contained in this sort of memoir of its great religionist. The simple Sûtra are of two classes. The first class consists of an account of Buddha's own wanderings and personal dealings both with his disciples and others, and were probably compiled by the first great Sangha, or Synod, within 100 years after his death, though bearing marks in many places of having been reconstructed at a later period. The other class takes notice of events and persons belonging to a subsequent period. Besides these there are the Mâhajâna-Sûtra, a more detailed and developed continuation of the same species of chronicle, but bearing marks of having been compiled at a much more advanced date still, for they introduce ideas which do not belong to the early teaching of Buddhism, but to a very late development.

These writings possess great historical importance, but yet are by no means free from the faults of inaccuracy of date and arrangement; of idealizations of the persons treated of; the introduction of fabulous incidents, transmigrations, and such like. The very desire of the Buddhists to make their records more complete and useful than the Brahmans', often led to additional complications, because it induced all manner of interpolations—as for instance, whole series of kingly