Similarly in the Sigalovada-sutta it is laid down that a good man ministers to monks and to Brahmans.  If it is true that Ajatasattu countenanced Devadatta’s attempts to murder him, he ignored such disagreeable details with a sublime indifference, for he continued to frequent Rajagaha, received the king, and preached to him one of his finest sermons without alluding to the past.  He stands before us in the suttas as a man of amazing power of will, inaccessible to fear, promises and, one may add, to argument but yet in comparison with other religious leaders singularly gentle in taking the offensive against error.  Often he simply ignored it as irrelevant:  “Never mind” he said on his deathbed to his last convert “Never mind, whether other teachers are right or wrong.  Listen to me, I will teach you the truth.”  And when he is controversial his method is often to retain old words in honourable use with new meanings.  The Brahmans are not denounced like the Pharisees in the New Testament but the real Brahman is a man of uprightness and wisdom:  the real sacrifice is to abstain from sin and follow the Truth.

Women played a considerable part in the entourage of Gotama.  They were not secluded in India at that time and he admitted that they were capable of attaining saintship.  The work of ministering to the order, of supplying it with food and raiment, naturally fell largely to pious matrons, and their attentive forethought delighted to provide for the monks those comforts which might be accepted but not asked for.  Prominent among such donors was Visakha, who married the son of a wealthy merchant at Savatthi and converted her husband’s family from Jainism to the true doctrine.  The Vinaya recounts how after entertaining the Buddha and his disciples she asked eight boons which proved to be the privileges of supplying various classes of monks with food, clothing and medicine and of providing the nuns with bathing dresses, for, said she, it shocked her sense of propriety to see them bathing naked.  But the anecdotes respecting the Buddha and women, whether his wife or others, are not touched with sentiment, not even so much as is found in the conversation between Yajnavalkya and Maitreyi in the Upanishad.  To women as a class he gave their due and perhaps in his own opinion more than their due, but if he felt any interest in them as individuals, the sacred texts have obliterated the record.  In the last year of his life he dined with the courtezan Ambapali and the incident has attracted attention on account of its supposed analogy to the narrative about Christ and “the woman which was a sinner.”  But the resemblance is small.  There is no sign that the Buddha, then eighty years of age, felt any personal interest in Ambapali.  Whatever her morals may have been, she was a benefactress of the order and he simply gave her the same opportunity as others of receiving instruction.  When the Licchavi princes tried to induce him to dine with them instead