Buddhism in China (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. AGREEMENT BETWEEN EARLY NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN BOOKS. i. The inquiry as to the identity of the southern and northern books, although not ripe for final settlement, is still of such interest and importance that we may perhaps dwell on it a little longer. One thing is certain, that the southern canon surpasses any other collection of Buddhist books in point of arrangement and perspicuity. It is, in fact, on the face of it, a primitive arrangement. The northern collection, on the other hand (especially in China and Japan), is a miscellaneous and hap-hazard assortment of books, classified according to the will of the scholars who had charge of the work, with very little reference either to precedent or authority. It will, therefore, take time to establish anything like identity between the books of the two schools; but yet, as the question involved is really as to identity of fundamental belief, -more than divergence in detail, it is well to mark the agreements as we find them. First, then, with respect to discipline, or the constitution of the order. There is in the north and south agreement on this point . The Pratimoksha, or, in the Pali, Patimokkha. is a primitive work; it is the oldest, and in many respects the most important, material ofthe Vinaya literature.1 Now, this work has beeri translated as well from Chinese as from Pali, and the result shows almost an identity of character and contents. By an oversight on the part of the learned translators of the Pali text, the translation from the Chinese is not even referred to. They say, the text, as it lies before us, stands so well against all proofs, whether we compare its different parts one with another, or with the little that is yet known of its northern counterparts, that we are justified in regardin...