CHAPTER XIV

DHARMAGUPTA

ONE of the most important services that S'akyamuni rendered to his immediate disciples, as well as to posterity, was to supply them with a set of disciplinary rules of life. This discipline, known as the Vinaya, was not given in any formal manner. As the occasion arose the Master spoke his mind, and thus, little by little, during the long years of his ministry, there was formed as it were a corpus of miscellaneous rulings delivered without any definite plan or system. Yet there was no contradiction among these rulings, for it was one mind that gave them all, and that mind a singularly consistent and clear-seeing one.

What the Vinaya rulings lacked in system was, furthermore, more than compensated by the definiteness which came to them from the fact that in every case they were based on some real fact or some concrete difficulty. If the Sutras--those I mean, such as most of the Agamas, which can be distinctly traced back to the life of the Master--give us a true picture of S'akyamuni's life, we cannot but conclude that his mind vacillated at times between two or more alternative sets of speculative doctrines. Is there a god? Is there such

a thing as a soul? Does the physical universe really exist, or is it all a mere illusion? On these points he spoke in such a way as to leave his followers the largest room for speculative differences, and if we are disposed (not being metaphysicians) impatiently to throw aside the speculations of Sarvastivadins, Sautrantikas, and all the babble of Hinayana sectarianism, if we find it difficult to see how the term "Buddhism" can be stretched wide enough to cover all the variations of the so-called Mahayana, we must remember that it was the studied vagueness of the Master's own teaching that gave his followers the boldness to wander so far afield in the wide daring of their later speculations.

From all this vagueness of the Sutra pitaka the Vinaya pitaka was saved. When the Master gave rules to his communities for the sabbath meetings, for the confession of sins, for the admission of women, for the regulation of dress, etc., he was obliged to be terse, clear, and definite. The Vinaya rules, therefore, give us a more trustworthy picture of the Master's mind than do any of the Sutras. They make us feel that we are dealing with the real Buddha, with the real community of monks.