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| | | Book Name: The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol 1 | Previous Next | |
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Emperor Ming of the Han dynasty, AD 67, invited a few buddhist masters to China to bring the message of Buddha there. Nobody knows the names of those buddhist masters, but a group went to China. And the Emperor wanted a small anthology of buddhist sayings as a first introduction to the chinese people.
Buddhist scriptures are very big, the buddhist literature is in itself a world -- thousands of scriptures exist and they go into very great detail, because Buddha believes in logical analysis. He goes to the very root of everything. His analysis is profound and perfect, so he goes into very deep details.
It was very difficult. What to translate in a totally new country where nothing like Buddha has ever existed? So these buddhist masters composed a small anthology of forty-two chapters. They collected sayings from here and there, from this scripture and that, from this sermon and that.
This book was compiled in the fashion of confucian analects because it was going to be introduced to a confucian country -- people who had become very well aquainted with the way Confucius talks, with the way confucian scriptures were made and compiled. People were familiar with Confucius, so exactly on the same lines the buddhist masters composed this sutra. The analects of Confucius start every sentence, every paragraph with the phrase 'The master said...' This sutra starts in a similar way -- 'The Buddha said...' Every saying starts with 'The Buddha said...'
In the beginning of this century scholars used to think that the original must have existed in Sanskrit or Pali, then it disappeared, was lost, and this sutra in the Chinese is a translation. That is absolutely wrong. This sutra never existed in India. As it is, it never existed. Of course, each saying comes from Buddha, but the whole work is a new work, a new anthology. So you have to remember that.
And that's why I have chosen it as a first introduction for you to the Buddha's world. It is very simple. It contains all in a very simple way. It is very direct. It is in essence the whole message, but very short, not very long and lengthy as other buddhist scriptures are.
THE BUDDHA SAID:
TO
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