ABSTRACT
Buddha was not only “ the teacher of the Way” and “ the producer of the unproduced Path”: he was for the Buddhist the actuality of the central doctrine, the one who had lived it and reached the goal. Hence everything that we learn in the Scriptures about his personal history is coloured by dogmatic views concerning the nature and destiny of a Buddha and of those acts which were essential steps in his career. The records of personal details which we find in the Scriptures are generally not the Buddha-word but additions due mainly to classes of reciters (bhāṇaka) of the discourses. The two most important classes were the reciters of the Dīgha and the reciters of the Majjhima, and it is easy to see that they possessed traditions which sometimes became incorporated in the text. We also find divergent traditions, for the Jātaka commentator after telling how the four signs, which appeared to Gotama just before he left the world, occurred on different days, adds, “ the Dīgha-reciters, however, say that they happened on the same day.” 1 Evidently unwritten divergent traditions existed.
