disciples and the organization of the Sangha or
order. Though he was ready to hear and teach all, the portrait presented
to us is not that of a popular preacher who collects and frequents
crowds but rather that of a master, occupied with the instruction of his
pupils, a large band indeed but well prepared and able to appreciate and
learn by heart teaching which, though freely offered to the whole world,
was somewhat hard to untrained ears. In one passage[356] an enquirer
asks him why he shows more zeal in teaching some than others. 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 mul