The Sangha, as this order was called, arose naturally out of the social conditions of India in the time of Gotama.  It was considered proper that an earnest-minded man should renounce the world and become a wanderer.  In doing this and in collecting round him a band of disciples who had a common mode of life Gotama created nothing new.  He merely did with conspicuous success what every contemporary teacher was doing.  The confraternity which he founded differed from others chiefly in being broader and more human, less prone to extravagances and better organized.  As we read the accounts in the Pitakas, its growth seems so simple and spontaneous that no explanation is necessary.  Disciples gather round the master and as their numbers increase he makes a few salutary regulations.  It is almost with surprise that we find the result to be an organization which became one of the great forces of the world.

The Buddha said that he taught a middle path equally distant from luxury and from self-mortification, but Europeans are apt to be struck by his condemnation of pleasure and to be repelled by a system which suppresses so many harmless activities.  But contemporary opinion in India criticized his discipline as easy-going and lax.  We frequently hear in the Vinaya that the people murmured and said his disciples behaved like those who still enjoy the good things of the world.  Some, we are told, tried to enter the order merely to secure a comfortable existence[527].  It is clear that he went to the extreme limits which public opinion allowed in dispensing with the rigours considered necessary to the religious life, and we shall best understand his spirit if we fix our attention not so much on the regime, to our way of thinking austere, which he prescribed—­the single meal a day and so on—­as on his insistence that what is necessary is emancipation of heart and mind and the cultivation of love and knowledge, all else being a matter of indifference.  Thus he says to the ascetic Kassapa[528] that though a man perform all manner of penances, yet if he has not attained the bliss which comes of good conduct, a good heart and good mind, he is far from being a true monk.  But when he has the heart of love that knows no anger nor ill-will, when he has destroyed lust and become emancipated even before death, then he deserves the name of monk.  It is a common thing to say, he goes on, that it is hard to lead the life of a monk.  But asceticism is comparatively easy; what is really hard is the conversion and emancipation of the heart.

In India, where the proclivity to asceticism and self-torture is endemic, it was only natural that penance should in very truth seem easier and more satisfactory than this spiritual discipline.  It won more respect and doubtless seemed more tangible and definite, more like what the world expected from a holy man.  Accordingly we find that efforts were made by Devadatta and others to induce the Buddha to increase the severity of his discipline.  But he refused[529].  The more ascetic form of life, which he declined to make obligatory, is described in the rules known as Dhutangas, of which twelve or thirteen are enumerated.  They are partly a stricter form of the ordinary rules about food and dress and partly refer to the life of a hermit who lives in the woods or in a cemetery.