ABSTRACT
What others call ‘Buddhism’, the Buddhists themselves call ‘Dharma’. In its essentials the Dharma-theory is common to all schools, and provides the framework within which Buddhist wisdom operates. It was the merit of Th. Stcherbatsky 225 to have discerned that views on ‘Dharma’ are shared by all varieties of Buddhism, that they are the basis of all the more advanced forms of meditation and theorizing, and the starting-point of all later developments. Before him scholars had been so intent on making the Buddha appear as a moralist that the significance of the philosophical analysis of reality into its factors, or ‘dharmas’, was either overlooked or dismissed as a later scholastic elaboration. Stcherbatsky, however, believed that an interpretation of Buddhism in close dependence not only on the Indian commentaries, but on the continuous living tradition of Tibet, Mongolia, China and Japan is more likely to bring us nearer to the original doctrine of the Buddha than the arbitrary reconstructions of modern European scholars.
