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“ Allowing for all the earnestness undeniably animating both the story-teller and the hearers, it is clear that they enjoyed, all the time, the dry humour of the exaggeration and grotesqueness of the details of the story as it went along. Now the details are given only in the Sutta; and omitted, as well-known, in the Jātaka. They build up a gorgeous fairy tale in which the ancient mythology of the sun-myth is brought into play in order to show how the greatest possible majesty and glory of the greatest and best of all possible kings is, after all, but vanity. ”

“ The Buddha’s answer is to tell him a wonderful legend of a King Wide-realm, and of the sacrifice he offered—truly the most extraordinary sacrifice imaginable. All its marvellous details, each one settled, be it noted, on the advice of a Brahman, are described with a deliberate extravagance none the less delicious because of the evident earnestness of the moral to be inferred. ”

“ Let his majesty accept it at our hands!”
‘Sufficient wealth have I, my friends, laid up, the produce of taxation that is just. Do you keep yours, and take away more with you!”
‘When they had thus been refused by the king, they went aside, and considered thus one with the other: “It would not beseem us now, were we to take this wealth away again to our own homes. King Wide-realm is offering, a great sacrifice. Let us too make an after-sacrifice!” ”

“ In that case we should have before us a novelette, an historical romance, in which the Very Reverend Sir Goldstick Sharp-tooth, lord of the manor of Khānumata—cruel enough, no doubt, and very keen on being sure that his ‘soul’ should be as comfortable in the next world as he was, now, in this, makes up his mind to secure that most desirable end by the murder of a number of his fellow creatures, in honour of a god, or as he would put it, by celebrating a sacrifice. ”

“ Far from exalting King Wide-realm’s procedure, they put his sacrifice at the very bottom of a long list of sacrifices each better than the other, and leading up to the sweetest and highest of all, which is the attainment of Arahatship.
Here again, except in the last paragraph, there is nothing exclusively Buddhistic. That a sacrifice of the heart is better than a sacrifice of bullocks, the ethical more worthy than any physical sacrifice, is simply the sensible, rational, human view of the matter. ”

“ Of each of these let them, who do evil, alone with their evil. For them who do well let your majesty offer, for them, Sire, arrange the rites, them let the king gratify, in them shall your heart within find peace. ”

“ Should there be people who should say of the king, as he is offering the sacrifice: ‘King Wide-realm is celebrating sacrifice without having invited the four classes of his subjects, without himself having the eight personal gifts, without the assistance of a Brahman who has the four personal gifts;’ then would they speak not according to the fact. For the consent of the four classes has been obtained, the king has the eight, and his Brahman has the four, personal gifts. With regard to each and every one of these sixteen conditions the king may rest assured that it has been fulfilled. ”

“ Throughout the whole story we have no evidence of any one who called himself a Lokāyatika, or his own knowledge Lokāyata. After the early use of the word in some such sense as Nature-lore, folk-lore, there is a tone of unreality over all the statements we have. And of the real existence of a school of thought, or of a system of philosophy that called itself by the name there is no trace. In the middle period the riddles and quibbles of the Nature-lorists are despised. ”

“ But it is never called Lokāyata in the Piṭakas. It seems to be the view that there is a soul; but that it is diffused through the body, and dies with it; and is not a separate unity, within the body but not of it, which flies away from the body after death. It is not necessary to suppose that either. Saṅkara or the Buddhists had in their minds any book setting forth a philosophy based on this single proposition, or any actual school using such a book as a manual. ”

“ What we have is a sort of pun, a play upon the words, a piece of dialectic smartness, delightful to the hearers then, and unfortunately quite impossible to be rendered adequately, in English prose, for readers now.
And it is quite open to question whether this does not apply as much to the whole Sutta as to the legend of King Wide-realm. The Brahman Kūṭadanta (pointed-tooth) is mentioned nowhere else, and is very likely meant to be rather the hero of a tale than an historical character. ”

“ This feeling is increasingly vouched for in the early centuries of our era. In the fifth century we hear of a book, presumably on the ‘riddles and mysteries of the craft, as it is called ‘a book of quibbles.’ Various branches of mundane science had been by that time fairly well worked out. Lokāyata was still the name for the old Nature-lore, on the same level as folk-lore, and in contradistinction, not only to theosophy on the one hand, but to such science as there was on the other. ”

“ Whosoever there be in the king’s realm who devote themselves to trade, to them let his majesty the king—give capital. Whosoever there be in the king’s realm who devote themselves to government service, [36] to them let his majesty the king give wages and food. Then those men, following each his own business, will no longer harass the realm., the king’s revenue will go up; the country w ill be quiet and at peace; and the populace, pleased one with another and happy, dancing their children in their arms, will dwell with open doors. ”

“ Follow not Lokāyata disputation, Vitaṇḍa chatter, concerned with useless matters which neither give paradise nor lead men on into the Path.’
Saṅkara says: ‘There is thus, according to them, no soul, separate from the body, and capable of going to the heavenly world or obtaining release.’ [18] The unknown author of the Jātaka commentary, who certainly wrote however in the fifth century, gives the allied proposition as his own conclusion from the uselessness of their discussions, not as the opinion of the Lokāyatikas themselves. ”

“ He who with trusting heart takes a Buddha as his guide, and the Truth, and the Order—that is a sacrifice better than open largesse, better than perpetual alms, better than the gift to a dwelling place.’
[146] 26. ‘And is there, O Gotama, any other sacrifice less difficult and less troublesome, of greater fruit and of greater advantage than all these four?’
‘When a man with trusting heart takes upon himself the precepts—abstinence from destroying life; abstinence from taking what has not been given abstinence from evil; conduct in respect of lusts; abstinence from lying words ”

“ Now there will come to your sacrifice, Sire, men who destroy the life of living things, and men who refrain therefrom—men who take what has not been given, and men who refrain therefrom—men who act evilly in respect of lusts, and men who refrain therefrom—men who speak lies, and men who do not—men who slander, and men who do not—men who speak rudely, and men who do not—men who chatter vain things, and men who refrain therefrom— [139, 140] men who covet, and men who covet not—men who harbour ill will, and men who,harbour it not—men whose views are wrong, and men whose views are right. ”

“ And four personal qualifications of his advising Brahman make up the total of the sixteen articles required. No living thing, either animal or vegetable, is injured. All the labour is voluntary. And all the world co-operates in adding its share to the largesse of food, on strict vegetarian principles, in which, alone, the sacrifice consists. It is offered on behalf, not only of the king himself, but of all the good. And the king desires to propitiate, not any god, but living men. ”

“ It is impossible not to see that to the early tellers and hearers of these legends, always striking, often with a special beauty of their own, the unreality of the whole thing was just as evident, and was meant to be as evident, as it is now to us. ”

“ Lokāyataṃ vuccati vitaṇḍa-vāda-satthaṃ, ‘the Lokāyata is a text-book of the Vitaṇḍas (Sophists) [14] This does not help us much; but previously, p. 91, he explains Lokakkhāyikā as follows: ‘Foolish talk according to the Lokāyata, that is the Vitaṇḍa, such as: “By whom was this world created? By [\q 168/] such a one. A crow is white from the whiteness of its bones; cranes are red from the redness of their blood.” ”

“ Nor do either the Buddhists or Ṣaṅkara pretend to set out that opinion in full. They are dealing with it only so far as is necessary to enforce their own contrary positions. And though ‘materialist,’ as a rough and ready translation of. Saṅkara’s Lokāyatika, gives a good idea, to a European reader, of the sort of feeling conveyed to Saṅkara’s Indian readers, yet it is not quite exact. European ‘materialists’ (and one or two may be discovered by careful search) do not hold the view which Ṣaṅkara describes to his Lokāyatikas. ”

“ And just then a great sacrifice was being got ready on behalf of Kūṭadanta the Brahman. And a hundred bulls, and a hundred steers, and a hundred heifers, and a hundred goats, and a hundred rams had been brought to the post for the sacrifice.
2. Now the Brahmans and householders of Khānumata heard the news of the arrival of the Samaṇa Gotama. [28] [128] And they began to leave Khānumata in companies and in bands to go to the Ambalaṭṭhikā pleasaunce. ”