teachings (sometimes I got the feeling that K.G. saw the Buddha as a kind of
genial old philosophy professor – one could almost see the gold‐rimmed glasses,
the bushy moustache, the tweed jacket with leather elbows and pipe
smouldering in the top pocket, all surrounded by a multi‐hued aura of chalk‐
dust); some changes were made to fix inconsistencies in his plot line; some to
represent the practice of the monastic discipline more accurately; and some to
represent events in a way more in keeping with present times. If I have done the
master wrong in any of this, mea culpa – accordingly I ask for forgiveness.
Amaro Bhikkhu
Abhayagiri Buddhist Monastery,
California
February, 1999/2542
xii
~
A
UTHOR
’
S
N
OTE TO THE
F
IRST
E
DITION
,
1906~
W
ITH THE EXCEPTION
of the Buddha’s encounter with the pilgrim in the
hall of the potter (M 140, in which the pilgrim both recognises and
understands the Buddha) and the conversion of Angulimala
*
, all events
told in this book are my own fiction – I mention this because a few readers
of the manuscript thought I just edited an ancient Indian tale. Admittedly
I also took the account of the ball game from Dandin’s cycle of stories, the
‘Dasakumaracaritam’ – and in the brilliant introduction to the German
translation of this work – by J.J. Meyer – I found many a useful hint. For
the purpose of embellishment of the social milieu I drew from both
historical and cultural works, both older and newer – the former mainly
from the Jatakas – although this hardly needs a mention; of modern works
I used, amongst others, Richard Schmidt’s ‘Beiträge zur indischen Erotik’
(‘Contributions to Indian Eroticism’) which is an ample source of
information (Lotus‐Verlag, Leipzig 1902; the same house which published
the Dasakumaracaritam.)
The authentic words of the Buddha are easily recognisable as such
by their style – even though one could mistake a few I imitated (on pp
164‐7 [1999/2008 edns.]) as authentic ones. Mostly I took the words of the
Buddha from the outstanding translations of Dr. Karl E. Neumann’s ‘Die
Reden des Buddhos’ (Majjhima Nikaya). However I am also endebted to
Prof. Oldenberg, from whose epochal and still unsurpassed work ‘Buddha’
I took a few important quotes.
It hardly needs to be mentioned that the few quotes from the
Upanishads (pp 43ff, 148, 165) are taken from Prof. Deussen’s
‘Sechzig
Upanishads des Veda.’ To the second great translation of this excellent and
indefatigable inquirer, ‘Die Sutras des Vedanta,
’
my tenth chapter owes its
origin. If this curious piece is in substance a presentation of Indian
Übermenschentum [the doctrine of the Ariyan master‐race which became
the basis of Adolph Hitler’s philosophy, after K.G.’s time] – as the extreme
antithesis to Buddhism – it is in its form a painfully accurate copy of the
Vedantic S
ū
tra style, with the enigmatic brevity of the text, the true
principle of which – as Deussen has rightly recognised – consists in giving
*
Chapter 34. The details follow M 86 but the prevented shooting of the arrow is my own addition. The image of hell is
also not found there but in M 50; the following part, about the judge in hell is from MN 130; the subsequent scale of the
Many and the Few belongs to a different part of the Canon (AN — taken from K.E.Neumann’s “Buddhistische Anthologie,”
p 106ff.)
xiii
only catchwords for the memory, but never the words that are important
to the sense. In this way the text could without danger be fixed in writing,
since it was incomprehensible without the oral commentary of the teacher,
which thus usually became all the more pedantically intricate. Indeed,
these Kālī‐ S
ū
tras – like the whole Vājashravas episode – are a jocular
fiction of mine – but one, I believe, which will be granted by every student
of ancient India, to be within the bounds of the possible – nay, of the
probable.
India is indeed the land where even the robber must philosophise,
and occasionally become strange saints, and where even the Guardians of
Hell remain “polite until the last step up the gallows.”
Should anyone familiar with ancient India now be inclined to
castigate me because of some inaccuracies, I would now like to ask them
to consider whether or not he who wrote ‘The Pilgrim Kāmanīta’ might
not know best what liberties he has taken and why. Instead of the later
Sukhavati [which appears only in the Northern, Mahayana Buddhist
scriptures] I could easily have chosen the Heaven of the Thirty Three
Gods, and would have remained accurate and correct. But what, for
heaven’s sake, should I have done with those Thirty Three Gods when I
didn’t even have a use for Amitabha Buddha in Sukhavati? Also, enjoying
the licence of a poet, the question of whether or not the Mahābharata
existed at the time of the Buddha, or in what form, did not bother me. I
would also like to confess that I don’t even know whether it is possible to
see the snow‐capped peaks of the Himalayas from Kusinara, I actually
doubt it very much; this is not just because of distance, however, since
Schlagintweit was able to espy them from the even greater distance of the
Plains. Whatever the case: I am of the opinion that the requirements of
poetry preempt the requirements of geography.
If not for this principle I would never have allowed myself, for
‘poetry’s’ sake, to change anything even slightly in the original Buddhism;
the fact that I, as I already mentioned, used the much later and highly
popular image of Sukhavati cannot be reckoned as so much of a
distortion, since identical ideas are alive in spirit in the oldest traditions of
Buddhism. Much more was it my heart’s desire to unroll a picture of the
genuine Buddhist Lebens‐ und Weltanschauung – view of life and the world.
Dr. K. E. Neumann, without whose works this novel could never have
come into existence, wrote in the Afterword to his ‘Path to the Truth’
(Dhammapada) thirteen years ago: “Only the last decades, the last years,
have given us some idea of who the Buddha was and what he taught... the
poesy of Buddhism’s innermost nature, however, remains a book with
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