What was the original message of the Buddha? What if the teaching that has come down to us has become distorted by centuries of accretions?
A learned and impassioned discourse, What Was The Original Gospel of ‘Buddhism’? is the result of four decades of study, by the President of the Pali Text Society. A hundred years ago, Mrs. Rhys Davids already saw the tendency towards nihilism that would come to infect Western Buddhism, and she sought to correct it with a careful reading of the earliest Buddhist texts.
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“For me, the original teaching, buried in what we have for less than two centuries called ‘Buddhism’, was the work, by word, presence and life, of the North Indian ‘laird’ known as Gotama, son of Suddho’dana and of Maya. For me, during that life and for many years after it, ‘buddha’ meant just no more than it does in the Upanishads, the spiritually wake or wise man.”
“Let it be here never forgotten, that the message of the first Buddhists was, not for the monk as such, nor for the academic sophist; it was for the ‘many-folk’ (bahu-jana). Now in a folk-gospel we should expect to find its quest something which was (1) the man seeking to attain, and finally attaining his welfare as man; not a welfare without the man; the man must be in it; (2) a quest which is positive, not negative; (3) a quest which is not something as yet inconceivable by man; something he can think of as at least More than anything he yet knows.”
“I am mainly concerned with the historical importance of reconstructing original Buddhism – that is, Sakya, or the gospel of Shakyamuni – as a mission with a New Word to the Many, to the Man, and not to the monk as such …”
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