110 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
There is no denying that the passage in question is to be found in the text of the Mahaparinibbana Sutta as published by the Oxford University Press. The point, however, is not whether the passage exists or not. The point is that if any argument is to be built upon this passage, is it not necessary to prove that the text is original and genuine and not a latter interpolation by the Bhikkhus ?
Any one who knows the central teachings of the Buddha is quite bewildered after reading the Sutta Pitaka as we find it now wrapped about by the mythical drapery, disfigured by additions of purely Brahmanic ideas entirely foreign to the original Buddhist thought and distorted by the twists and turns given to it by monastic ideas intended to enforce monastic ideals. So much so that one is inclined to join in wonder with Mrs. Rhys Davids [1], and ask :
“Where in these pages of (the Sutta Pitaka) is Gotama? How much of them, how little, is a blend of (it may be) original saying clearly or confusedly reproduced, of fillings by ages of successive narrators, of memory-schemes drawn up by teachers, not teachers of the multitude but of orally learning pupils, of efforts, often clumsy, by editors to set down in writing much that had long been more fluently told ? And all of them, narrators, teachers, editors, were men whose choice of ideals of life differed from that of the rest of the world, differed the more in proportion as they were sincerely not of the world as well as not in it. Through this distorting medium he has to read, and ask himself which sayings, put into the mouth of a certain accredited ‘teacher and way-shower” of truth, are likely to have come from such a man as he is recorded to have been ?”
There is therefore nothing very extravagant in the suggestion that this passage is a later interpolation by the Bhikkhus. In the first place the Sutta Pitaka was not reduced to writing till 400 years had passed after the death of the Buddha. Secondly, the Editors who compiled and edited them were Monks
1 : Preface (xiii) to Kindred Sayings, Vol. II.