through various well-ascertained channels[1], and how they still supply our nurseries with the earliest lessons of morality, good sense, and good manners.
It may be said that the lessons of morality inculcated in these homilies are too exaggerated to be of any practical usefulness. Still this modus docendi is very common in Sacred Books, where we often find an extreme standard held up in the hope of producing an impression that may be useful in less extreme cases. To offer the other cheek to whosoever shall strike our right cheek, to give up our cloak to him who takes away our coat, to declare that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God, are all lessons which we also take cum grano salis. They ask for much in the hope that something may be given. That there is danger too in this mode of teaching cannot be denied. We are told that Ârya Sûra, in order to follow the example of Buddha in a former birth, threw himself in this life before a starving tigress to be devoured. Let us hope that this too was only a Gâtaka.
When once a taste for these moralising stories had arisen, probably owing to Buddha's daily intercourse with the common people, their number grew most rapidly. The supply was unlimited, all that was required was the moral application, the Haec fabula docet. The Buddhists give their number as 550. The earliest are probably those which are found in different parts of the Buddhist Canon. In the Kariyâ-pitaka there is a collection of thirty-five stories of the former lives of Buddha, in each of which he acquired one of the ten Pâramitâs or Great Perfections which fit a human being for Buddhahood[2]. A similar collection is found in the Buddhavamsa[3], which contains an account of the life of the coming Buddha, the Bodhisat, in the various
