Is This Book To Be Believed?

Abstract

I have tried in the pages above to show that the Buddha's main ideas are powerful and coherent. If I had a more thorough knowledge of the Pali Canon than, alas, I can claim, I would have made a better job of it; but surely I have done enough to show that this coherence is not imposed by my fantasy, but exists in the texts. Yet, according to the fashionable view represented by my critic, Buddhism, which at least in numerical terms must be the greatest movement in the entire history of human ideas, is a ball which was set rolling by someone whose ideas are not known and - one may presume from what he writes - can never be known. So the intellectual edifice which I have described came together by a process of accumulation, rather like an avalanche. I am reminded of the blindfolded monkeys whose random efforts somehow produce a typescript of the complete works of Shakespeare.