CHAPTER III

THE BUDDHA AND HIS GREATEST DISCIPLE

THANKS to the labours of many students of the Buddhist books, both Pali and Sanskrit, we are able to form a vivid mind's eye picture of the ministerial life of the Founder of Buddhism; indeed, the general indications of time are so wonderfully precise that we can trace his labours year by year for quite one-half of the forty-six years which his ministry occupied. There is a gap of about fifteen years near the end of his career for which we have no precise sequence of events; but even here we are not left entirely in the dark, for there are many indications given of the troublous days through which India in general, and the Buddhist community in particular, was then passing.

[paragraph continues] We are shown the successes which attended on S'akyamuni's first preaching. Conversions were numerous and rapid, converts of all ages and both sexes flocked into his community from every class of society, and were welcomed without distinction of caste and rank. Thousands caught the enthusiasm of the Buddha, and left all to follow him, while in the crowds who felt no vocation to the monastic life were kings and merchants, who vied with each other in the generosity of their gifts.

Among all these varied personages S'akyamuni moves like a king among men. Bimbisara recognizes the kingship that is in him, and offers to make him the Crown Prince of the Magadhan kingdom, S'akyan noblemen herald hint as the teacher and saint of their clan; and the universal esteem in which he is held is shown by nothing more strikingly than by the settlement of a dispute about rights of water which is referred to his arbitration by the tribes concerned. Evidently, the historical Tathagata was a practical person, far removed from the ecstatic dreamer of the Hokekyu.

Religious India had need of a sound mind with a practical bent, for the times were fraught with evil. Wars and rumours of war vexed the minds of the people; there was civil strife in Magadha, and sounds of more distant thunder came rolling over from Western Asia. All these hindered "the running of the wheel;" so did

also the conflicts with heretics, the dissensions among the disciples, and the many breaches of discipline which weakened the strength and vigour of his Buddhist followers.

S'akyamuni was a brave man and strong, but he felt the dissensions among his disciples most keenly, and there were many moments in which he sank into the lowest pit of despondency, and which his biographers have described as conflicts with the Evil One. These conflicts came at many periods in his life; they cannot be said to have shortened his days, for he lived to be over eighty, but they were evidently the result of the sorrows and anxieties which embittered the later years of his life.