In Gotama’s youth Bihar was full of wandering philosophers who appear to have been atheistic and disposed to uphold the boldest paradoxes, intellectual and moral.  There must however have been constructive elements in their doctrine, for they believed in reincarnation and the periodic appearance of superhuman teachers and in the advantage of following an ascetic discipline.  They probably belonged chiefly to the warrior caste as did Gotama, the Buddha known to history.  The Pitakas represent him as differing in details from contemporary teachers but as rediscovering the truth taught by his predecessors.  They imply that the world is so constituted that there is only one way to emancipation and that from time to time superior minds see this and announce it to others.  Still Buddhism does not in practice use such formulae as living in harmony with the laws of nature.

Indian literature is notoriously concerned with ideas rather than facts but the vigorous personality of the Buddha has impressed on it a portrait more distinct than that left by any other teacher or king.  His work had a double effect.  Firstly it influenced all departments of Hindu religion and thought, even those nominally opposed to it.  Secondly it spread not only Buddhism in the strict sense but Indian art and literature beyond the confines of India.  The expansion of Hindu culture owes much to the doctrine that the Good Law should be preached to all nations.

The teaching of Gotama was essentially practical.  This statement may seem paradoxical to the reader who has some acquaintance with the Buddhist scriptures and he will exclaim that of all religious books they are the least practical and least popular:  they set up an anti-social ideal and are mainly occupied with psychological theories.  But the Buddha addressed a public such as we now find it hard even to imagine.  In those days the intellectual classes of India felt the ordinary activities of life to be unsatisfying:  they thought it natural to renounce the world and mortify the flesh:  divergent systems of ritual, theology and self-denial promised happiness but all agreed in thinking it normal as well as laudable that a man should devote his life to meditation and study.  Compared with this frame of mind the teaching of the Buddha is not unsocial, unpractical and mysterious but human, business-like and clear.  We are inclined to see in the monastic life which he recommended little but a useless sacrifice but it is evident that in the opinion of his contemporaries his disciples had an easy time, and that he had no intention of prescribing any cramped or unnatural existence.  He accepted the current conviction that those who devote themselves to the things of the mind and spirit should be released from worldly ties and abstain from luxury but he meant his monks to live a life of sustained intellectual activity for themselves and of benevolence for others.  His teaching is formulated in severe and technical phraseology, yet the substance of it is so simple that many have criticized it as too obvious and jejune to be the basis of a religion.  But when he first enunciated his theses some two thousand five hundred years ago, they were not obvious but revolutionary and little less than paradoxical.