Note 154 — Chapter XIII · NOTES.

In one sense the Buddha always showed an eclectic, conciliatory, synthetic spirit in his teachings. He refused to listen to any extreme doctrine which elevates one end too high at the expense of the other and culminates in the collapse of the whole edifice. When the Buddha left his seat of enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, he made it his mission to avoid both extremes, asceticism and hedonism. He proved throughout his life to be a calm, dignified, thoughtful, well-disciplined person, and at no time irritable in character,—in this latter respect being so different from the sage of Nazareth, who in anger cast out all the tradesmen in the temple and overthrew the tables of the money-changers, and who cursed the fig tree on which he could not find any fruit but leaves unfit to appease his hunger. The doctrine of the Middle Path (Mâdhyamârga), whatever it may mean morally and intellectually, always characterised the life and doctrine of Buddha as well as the later development of his teachings. His followers, however different in their individual views, professed as a rule to pursue steadily the Middle Path as paved by the Master. Even when Nâgârjuna proclaimed his celebrated doctrine of Eight No’s which seems to superficial critics nothing but an absolute nihilism, he said that the Middle Path could be found only in those eight no’s.[154]