dha 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.

In the Pitakas[530] Kassapa's disciples are d