them into the dialect most widely understood.  It was then a common thing (and the phenomenon may still be seen in India) for a man of learning to commit to memory a whole Veda together with subsidiary treatises on ritual, metre, grammar and genealogy.  For such memories it was not difficult to retain the principal points in a series of sermons.  The Buddha had preached day by day for about forty-five years.  Though he sometimes spoke with reference to special events he no doubt had a set of discourses which he regularly repeated.  There was the less objection to such repetition because he was continually moving about and addressing new audiences.  There were trained Brahman students among his disciples, and at his death many persons, probably hundreds, must have had by heart summaries of his principal sermons.

But a sermon is less easy to remember than a poem or matter arranged by some method of memoria technica.  An obvious aid to recollection is to divide the discourse into numbered heads and attach to each certain striking phrases.  If the phrases can be made to recur, so much the better, for there is a guarantee of correctness when an expected formula appears at appropriate points.

It may be too that the wearisome and mechanical iteration of the Pali Canon is partly due to the desire of the Sinhalese to lose nothing of the sacred word imparted to them by missionaries from a foreign country, for repetition to this extent is not characteristic of Indian compositions.  It is less noticeable in Sanskrit Buddhist sutras than in the Pali but is very marked in Jain literature.  A moderate use of it is a feature of the Upanishads.  In these we find recurring formulae and also successive phrases constructed on one plan and varying only in a few words[620].

But still I suspect that repetition characterized not only the reports of the discourses but the discourses themselves.  No doubt the versions which we have are the result of compressing a free discourse into numbered paragraphs and repetitions:  the living word of the Buddha was surely more vivacious and plastic than these stiff tabulations.  But the peculiarities of scholars can often be traced to the master and the Buddha had much the same need of mnemonics as his hearers.  For he had excogitated complicated doctrines and he imparted them without the aid of notes and though his natural wit enabled him to adapt his words to the capacity of his hearers and to meet argument, still his wish was to formulate a consistent statement of his thoughts.  In the earliest discourse ascribed to him, the sermon at Benares, we see these habits of numbering and repetition already fully developed.  The next discourse, on the absence of a soul, consists in enumerating the five words, form, sensation, perception, sankharas, and consciousness three times, and applying to each of them consecutively three statements or arguments, the whole concluding with a phrase which is used as