Buddhism, and were altering the direction of their mental vision. It was of no avail that they adhered in other respects in the main to the older teaching, that they professed to hold to the same ethical system, that they adhered, except in a few unimportant details, to the old regulations of the order of the Buddhist mendicant recluses. The ancient books, preserved in the Pāli Pitakas, being mainly occupied with the details of Arahatship, lost their exclusive value in the eyes of those whose attention was being directed to the details of Bodhisatship. And the opinion that every leader in their religious circles, every teacher distinguished among them for his sanctity of life, or for his extensive learning, was a Bodhisat, who might have and who probably had inherited the karma of some great teacher of old, opened the door to a flood of superstitious fancies.
It is worthy of note that the new school found its earliest professors and its greatest expounders in a part of India outside the districts to which the personal influence of Gotama and of his immediate followers had been confined. The home of early Buddhism was round about Kosala and Magadha; in the district, that is to say, north and south of the Ganges between where Allahabad now lies on the west and Rajgir on the east. The home of the Great Vehicle was, at first, in the countries farther to the north and west. Buddhism arose in countries where Sanskrit was never more than a learned tongue, and where the exclusive claims of the Brahmins had never been universally admitted. The Great Vehicle arose in the very stronghold of Brahminism, and among a people to whom Sanskrit, like Latin in the middle ages in Europe, was the literary lingua franca. The new literature therefore, which the new movement called forth, was written, and has been preserved, in Sanskrit—its principal books of Dharma, or doctrine, being the following nine: (1) Prajñā-pāramitā; (2) Gaṇḍa-vyūha; (3) Daśa-bhūmīś-vara; (4) Samādhi-rāja; (5) Lankāvatāra; (6) Saddharma-puṇḍarīka; (7) Tathāgata-guhyaka; (8) Lalita-vistara; (9) Suvarṇa-prabhāsa. The date of none of these works is known with any certainty, but it is highly improbable that any one of them is older than the 6th century after the death of Gotama. Copies of all of them were brought to Europe by Mr B. H. Hodgson, and other copies have been received since then; but only one of them has as yet been published in Europe (the Lalita Vistara, edited by Lofmann), and only two have been translated into any European language. These are the Lalita Vistara, translated into French, through the Tibetan, by M. Foucaux, and the Saddharma Puṇḍarīka, translated into English by Professor Kern. The former is legendary work, partly in verse, on the life of Gotama, the historical Buddha; and the latter, also partly in verse, is devoted to proving the essential identity of the Great and the Little Vehicles, and the equal authenticity of both as doctrines enunciated by the master himself.
Of the authors of these nine works, as of all the older Buddhist works with one or two exceptions, nothing has been ascertained. The founder of the system of the Great Vehicle is, however, often referred to under the name of Nāgārjuna, whose probable date is about A.D. 200.
Together with Nāgārjuna, other early teachers of the Great Vehicle whose names are known are Vasumitra, Vasubandhu, Āryadeva, Dharmapāla and Guṇamati—all of whom were looked upon as Bodhisats. As the newer school did not venture so far as to claim as Bodhisats the disciples stated in the older books to have been the contemporaries of Gotama (they being precisely the persons known as Arahats), they attempted to give the appearance of age to the Bodhisat theory by representing the Buddha as being surrounded, not only by his human companions the Arahats, but also by fabulous beings, whom they represented as the Bodhisats existing at that time. In the opening words of each Mahāyāna treatise a list is given of such Bodhisats, who were beginning, together with the historical Bodhisats, to occupy a position in the Buddhist church of those times similar to that occupied by the saints in the corresponding period of the history of Christianity in the Church of Rome. And these lists of fabulous Bodhisats have now a distinct historical importance. For they grow in length in the later works; and it is often possible by comparing them one with another to fix, not the date, but the comparative age of the books in which they occur. Thus it is a fair inference to draw from the shortness of the list in the opening words of the Lalita Vistara, as compared with that in the first sections of the Saddharma Puṇḍarīka, that the latter work is much the younger of the two, a conclusion supported also by other considerations.
Among the Bodhisats mentioned in the Saddharma Puṇḍarīka, and not mentioned in the Lalita Vistara, as attendant on the Buddha are Mañju-śrī and Avalokiteśvara. That these saints were already acknowledged by the followers of the Great Vehicle at the beginning of the 5th century is clear from the fact that Fa Hien, who visited India about that time, says that “men of the Great Vehicle” were then worshipping them at Mathura, not far from Delhi (F. H., chap. xvi.). These were supposed to be celestial beings who, inspired by love of the human race, had taken the so-called Great Resolve to become future Buddhas, and who therefore descended from heaven when the actual Buddha was on earth, to pay reverence to him, and to learn of him. The belief in them probably arose out of the doctrine of the older school, which did not deny the existence of the various creations of previous mythology and speculation, but allowed of their actual existence as spiritual beings, and only deprived them of all power over the lives of men, and declared them to be temporary beings liable, like men, to sin and ignorance, and requiring, like men, the salvation of Arahatship. Among them the later Buddhists seem to have placed their numerous Bodhisats; and to have paid especial reverence to Mañju-śrī as the personification of wisdom, and to Avalokiteśwara as the personification of overruling love. The former was afterwards identified with the mythical first Buddhist missionary, who is supposed to have introduced civilization into Tibet about two hundred and fifty years after the death of the Buddha.
The way was now open to a rapid fall from the simplicity of early Buddhism, in which men’s attention was directed to the various parts of the system of self-culture, to a belief in a whole pantheon of saints or angels, which appealed more strongly to the half-civilized The five mystic trinities. races among whom the Great Vehicle was now professed. A theory sprang up which was supposed to explain the marvellous powers of the Buddhas by representing them as only the outward appearance, the reflection, as it were, or emanation, of ethereal Buddhas dwelling in the skies. These were called Dhyāni Buddhas, and their number was supposed to be, like that of the Buddhas, innumerable. Only five of them, however, occupied any space in the speculative world in which the ideas of the later Buddhists had now begun to move. But, being Buddhas, they were supposed to have their Bodhisats; and thus out of the five last Buddhas of the earlier teaching there grew up five mystic trinities, each group consisting of one of these five Buddhas, his prototype in heaven the Dhyāni Buddha, and his celestial Bodhisat. Among these hypothetical beings, the creations of a sickly scholasticism, hollow abstractions without life or reality, the particular trinity in which the historical Gotama was assigned a subordinate place naturally occupied the most exalted rank. Amitābha, the Dhyāni-Buddha of this trinity, soon began to fill the largest place in the minds of the new school; and Avalokiteśwara, his Bodhisat, was looked upon with a reverence somewhat less than his former glory. It is needless to add that, under the overpowering influence of these vain imaginations, the earnest moral teachings of Gotama became more and more hidden from view. The imaginary saints grew and flourished. Each new creation, each new step in the theory, demanded another, until the whole sky was filled with forgeries of the brain, and the nobler and simpler lessons of the founder of the religion were hidden beneath the glittering stream of metaphysical subtleties.
Still worse results followed on the change of the earlier point of view. The acute minds of the Buddhist pandits, no longer occupied with the practical lessons of Arahatship, turned their
