16. The Christ Thought and Its Relation to Egyptian and Buddhist Spiritual Life
GA 87/1902-02-22/p034
·1902-02-22
·
English
HighHigh alignmentThis translation's paragraph count matches the German original — the locus maps cleanly to the same paragraph in DE.
Record: listeners' notes. Written from listeners' notes, summaries, or memory rather than a shorthand transcript. The wording is the note-taker's as much as Steiner's: weigh a single striking phrase here far more cautiously than the same phrase in a stenographic volume, and do not rest an argument on one word. Evidence: «Auch wenn die Mitschrift noch nicht die später übliche Genauigkeit aufweist» (Even though the transcript does not yet have the accuracy usual later). The publisher's description of the volume, as mirrored on AnthroWiki (GA 87), which calls the cycle the earliest of which a listener's transcript exists. The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.
The twenty-nine-year-old Buddha is prompted by the sight of human misery, by the sight of suffering and illness, by the sight of evil on earth, to leave his wife and child to see in solitude what path he must walk; and we hear that on his way through solitude he recruits disciples from among those who have already chosen solitude, and that he then speaks a number of beatitudes. We hear from the mouth of the thirty-year-old Buddha: Blessed are the lonely. Blessed are those who are free from all lust. Blessed are those who rise above the thoughts of their own ego. Truly, this is supreme bliss.
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