Note 199 — THE NIDĀNAKATHĀ OR THE THREE EPOCHS. (continued 2)

The Great Struggle played a great part in the Buddhist system of moral training; it was the wrestling with the flesh by which a true Buddhist overcame delusion and sin, and attained to Nirvāna. It is best explained by its fourfold division into 1. Mastery over the passions. 2. Suppression of sinful thoughts. 3. Meditation on the seven kinds of Wisdom (Bodhi-angā, see ‘Buddhism’ p. 173); and 4. Fixed attention, the power of preventing the mind from wandering. It is also called Sammappadhāna, Right Effort, and forms the subject of the Mahā-Padhāna Sutta, in the Dīgha Nikāya. The system was, of course, not worked out at the time here referred to; but throughout the chronicle the biographer ascribes to Gotama, from the beginning, a knowledge of the whole Buddhist theory as afterwards elaborated. For to our author that theory had no development, it was Eternal and Immutable Truth already revealed by innumerable previous Buddhas.