English
Sumeru into particles as fine as mustard seed and we can 60 BUDDHISM IN ENGLISH count them, but the age of Cakyamuni none can measure ... the Buddha never entered into Parinirvana, the Good Law will never perish. He shewed an earthly death merely for the benefit of sentient beings.” The meaning of all this is obvious. Mahayana does not deny the earthly career of Cakyamuni lasting for some eighty odd years, and subject to the usual frailties of human existence, but teaches that the latter was only the Nirmanakaya, the Body of Transformation, behind which was the eternal Sambhogakaya, or the Body of Glory, 3, Dharmakaya While then the Nirmanakaya is the human Buddha, and the Sambhogakaya the glorified Buddha ideal, the Dhar- makaya is the essence of Buddhahood, the norm of exis- tence, and is therefore synonymous with the Bhitatathata of which it is but a devotional symbol. The idea of the Dharmakaya probably originated in the fact that shortly before his decease Cakyamuni is supposed to have told his disciples that though after his death no longer personally would he be with them, yet (metaphori- cally speaking) he, like all other Buddhas, would continue to exist in tiie Law of Dharma. Now in the first place, by “existing in the Law”? he may have meant merely existing in the doctrine which he taught, but to quote Suzuki, “Dharma is a very pregnant word, and covers a wide range of meaning. It comes from the root dr, which means to hold, to carry, to bear, and the primitive sense of DOCTRINE OF TRINITY 61 Dharma is that which carries, supports, or bears. Then it came tO signify that which forms the norm or regulates the course of things, i. e. the Law, institution, rule, doc- trine.., essential quality, substance, that which exists in reality, being.” Accordingly, though originally the spirit of the Buddha may have been synonymous with the doctrines of the Buddha it is not long before it became synonymous with the root of life, the essence of being, the norm of the universe. In a word, then, comparing the Trikadya with Western ideas we may say that Bhitatatha@ta stands for the Essence of Godhood, the ultimate and unmanifested Deity, the Dharmakaya to the norm of manifest world, the Christian God the Father, the Sambhogakiiya to a compound of the Logos, the Resurrected Christ, and Wells’s Invisible King, and the Nirmanakaya to the in- carnation of the divine. —W. M. McGovern, “Introduction to the Mahayana Buddhism” — BUDDHISM IN ENGLISH PART IV HISTORICAL CHAPTER XVI BUDDHIST CONSTANTINE Of the events of the first few years of Acoka’s reign we have no information. In the ninth year a war broke out between Magadha and Kalinga, perhaps the then most powerful kingdom in India still independent of the empire ruled over by Acoka. Of the rights and wrongs of the dispute we cannot judge. Our sole information comes from one side only, and is an incidental reference in the thirteenth Edict, published by Acoka five years/after- wards. In that document the King states that it was the remorse and pity aroused in his mind by the horrors of the conquest—the killing, death by disease, and forcible carrying away of individuals, to which non-combatants and even peaceable brahmins and recluses were exposed— that resulted in his conversion. He does not say to what, That, apparently, was supposed to be quite clear to any one. It was sufficient to say that he had come to the opinion that the only true conquest by the religion (by the Dhamma). BUDDHIST CONSTANTINE 63 We are told, by the King himself, of three stages in his conversion. The Rupnath Edict is of about the same date as the last, but perhaps a little earlier, say the thirteenth year after his being formally anointed, or, as we should say, crowned—that is, in the seventeenth year after he became a jure the king. There he says that for two and a half years he had been a lay disciple(an upasaka), but had not developed much zeal; but one year before (before the date of the Edict) he had entered the Order, and begun to show greater zeal. Then in the eighth Rock Edict he declares that in the thirteenth year after his coronation he had set out for the Sambodhi— that is to say, he had set out, along the Aryan Eightfold Path, towards the attainment (if not in his present life then in some future birth as a man) of the state of mind called Arhatship. So in the ninth year of his reign an Upisaka, in the eleventh year a Bhiksu, in the thirteenth, still reaching upward, he enters the Path. This is his own account of the matter, and he gives no one else any credit for his progress. It is not by any suggestion or instruction, received either from layman or recluse, that he had adopted this course. It is his own doing throughout. The Chroniclers profess to know the name of the Bhiksu who was instrumental in his conversion. I am not prepared to say, though their evidence is sa much later, that there may not be some truth in their view.@ It is quite true that it is sound Buddhist doctrine that each man is “to be a lamp unto himself, to hold fast 64 BUDDHISM IN ENGLISH as a refuge to the truth (the Dhamma], to look not for refuge to any one besides himself.” But it is so very likely that one factor at least in the King’s change of heart may, have been the exhortation or conversation of one or other of the Arhats, that we may suppose both accounts to have been right. It is strange for a king, whether in India or in Europe, to devote himself strenu- ously to the higher life at all. It is doubly strange that, in doing so, he should select a system of belief where salvation, independent of any belief in a soul, lay in self-conquest. No ordinary man would have so behaved; and the result must have been due mainly to his own character, his firmness of purpose, his strong individuality. But he was quite incapable of inventing the system. We know it had existed long before. And it is not probable that those who had already trained themselves in it were wholly without influence upon him. Henceforward he devoted his great energy, on the powerful resources of his wide empire to the realisation of his new ideals. To that end all his edicts were publish- ed, all the changes he made in the administration of his empire were directed, and enormous sums were lavi- shed in the erection of costly buildings in aid of the new faith. - It is characteristic that he says not a word of these last. To his mind it was apparently the teaching that was so much the most important thing that it swal- lowed up every other consideration. But the unanimous testimony of all the later traditions, confirmed as it is by MAHAYANA BUDDHISM 65 the actual remains discovered, leaves no doubt upon the point. It is true that no building erected by Acoka remains intact above ground, but an inscription of his has been found at Sanchi, and it is the unanimous opinion of scholars that he built the first temple at Buddha Gaya. Sanchi, the old name of which is Chetiya Giri (the Hill with the Shrine upon it), must have been a famous place before Acoka went to Ujjeni. There are no less than eleven topes on the plateau at the top of the hill. Some of them were opened in 1822 and the rest in 1851. At the second excavation one of the smaller ones was found to contain part of the ashes from the funeral pyres of Cariputta and Moggallina, two of the Buddha’s princi- pal disciples. The village Vedisa, where Acoka made the acquaintance of his first wife, lies close by, and tops of other hills in the neighbourhood are also crowned with stupas. — TZ. W. Rhys Davids, “Buddhist India’ — CHAPTER XVII MAHAYANA BUDDHISM The obscurest period in the history of Buddhism is that which follows the reign of Agoka, but the enquirer cannot grope for long in these dark ages without stumbling upon the word Mahayana, This is the name given to a move- ment which in its various phases may be regarded as a 66 BUDDHISM IN ENGLISH philosophical school, a sect and a church, and though it is not always easy to define its relationship to other schools and sects it certainly became a prominent aspect of Buddhism in India about the beginning of our era be- sides achieving enduring triumphs in the Far East. The word signifies Great Vehicle or Carriage, that is a means of conveyance to salvation, and is contrasted with Hinayana, the Little Vehicle, a name bestowed on the more conservative party though not willingly accepted by them. The simplest description of the two vehicles is that given by the Chinese traveller I-Ching (635-713 A. D.) who saw them both as living realities in India, He says “Those who worship Bodhisattvas and read Maha- yana Sitras are called Mahayanists, while those who do not do this are called Hinay4anists.” In other words, the Mahayanists have scriptures of their own, not included in the Hinayanist Canon and adore superhuman beings in the stage of existence immediately below Buddhahood and practically differing from Indian deities, Many cha- racteristics could be added to I-Ching’s description but they might not prove universally true of the Mahayana nor entirely absent from the Hinayana, for however divergent the two Vehicles may have become when separated geo- graphically, for instance in Ceylon and Japan, it is clear that when they were in contact, as in India and China, the distinction was not always sharp. But in general the Mahayina was more popular, not in the sense of being simpler, for parts of its teaching were exceedingly abs- MAHAYANA BUDDHISM 67 truse, but in the sense of striving to invent or include doctrines agreeable to the masses.