The answer is, if a landowner had three fields, one excellent, one middling and one of poor soil, would he not first sow the good field, then the middling field, and last of all the bad field, thinking to himself; it will just produce fodder for the cattle?  So the Buddha preaches first to his own monks, then to lay-believers, and then, like the landowner who sows the bad field last, to Brahmans, ascetics and wandering monks of other sects, thinking if they only understand one word, it will do them good for a long while.  It was to such congregations of disciples or to enquirers belonging to other religious orders that he addressed his most important discourses, iterating in grave numbered periods the truths concerning the reality of sorrow and the equal reality of salvation, as he sat under a clump of bamboos or in the shade of a banyan, in sight perhaps of a tank where the lotuses red, white and blue, submerged or rising from the water, typified the various classes of mankind.

He did not start by laying down any constitution for his order.  Its rules were formed entirely by case law.  Each incident and difficulty was referred to him as it arose and his decision was accepted as the law on that point.  During his last illness he showed a noble anxiety not to hamper his followers by the prestige of his name but to leave behind him a body of free men, able to be a light and a help to themselves.  But a curious passage[357] represents an old monk as saying immediately after his death “Weep not, brethren; we are well rid of the Great Monk.  We used to be annoyed by being told, ’This beseems you and this does not beseem you.  But now we shall be able to do what we like and not have to do what we don’t like.’” Clearly the laxer disciples felt the Master’s hand to be somewhat heavy and we might have guessed as much.  For though Gotama had a breadth of view rare in that or in any age, though he refused to multiply observances or to dogmatize, every sutta indicates that he was a man of exceptional authority and decision; what he has laid down he has laid down; there is no compulsion or punishment, no vow of obedience or sacrificium intellectus; but it is equally clear that there is no place in the order for those who in great or small think differently from the master.

In shepherding his flock he had the assistance of his senior disciples.  Of these the most important were Sariputta and Moggallana, both of them Brahmans who left their original teacher Sanjaya to join him at the outset of his ministry.  Sariputta[358] enjoyed his confidence so fully that he acted as his representative and gave authoritative expositions of doctrine.  The Buddha even compared him to the eldest son of an Emperor who assists his father in the government.  But both he and Moggallana died before their master and thus did not labour independently.  Another important disciple Upali survived him and probably contributed materially to the codification of the Vinaya.  Anuruddha and Ananda, both of