L A M A I S M 227
claims of the Brahmans had never been universally admitted. The Great Vehicle arose in the very stronghold of Brahmanism, and among a people to whom Sanskrit was a familiar tongue. 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) Prajna-paramita ; (2) Ganda-vyuha ; (3) Dasa-bhiimes- vara; (4) Samddhi-rdja ; (5) Lankavatara ; (6) Sad- dharma-pundarlka ; (7) Tathayata-guhyaka ; (8) Lalita- viatara ; (9) Suvarna-pmbhasa. 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 none of them have as yet been published in Europe (the Lalita Vistara has been published by Rajendra Lai Mitra in Calcutta), 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 Pundarika, translated into French by M. Eugene Burnouf. The former of these two is a 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 Vehicle and the equal authenticity of both as doctrines enunciated by the master himself.
Of the authors of these nine works, as indeed of all the older Buddhist works with one or two exceptions, nothing has as yet been ascertained. The founder of the system of the Great Vehicle is, however, often referred to under the name of Nagarjuna or Nāgasena, a personage celebrated even in the countries to which the Greater Vehicle has never penetrated as the contemporary and religious instructor of the Yavana king Milinda, and as the answerer of the famous Questions of Milinda, a work still preserved in its Pāli form.[1] As Milinda may with all probability be identified with the Greek king Menander, who was one of the followers of Alexander the Great in Bactria, this tradition would imply that the origin of the Great Vehicle must be assigned to as early a date as the 2d century B.C. But the work itself was probably composed at least some centuries afterwards; and it would be hazardous to attach too much importance to any chronological data drawn from it. We must be content at present to settle a certain historical sequence in the principal doctrines of the system which developed into Lāmāism, without pretending to fix any actual dates.
Together with Nāgasena, other early teachers of the Great Vehicle whose names are known to us are Vasumitra or Vasubandhu, Āryadeva, Dharmapāla, and Gunamati – all of whom were looked upon as Bodisats. As the newer school did not venture so far as to claim as Bodisats 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 Bodisat 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 Bodisats existing at that time. In the opening words of each Mahāyāna treatise a list is given of such Bodisats, who were beginning, together with the historical Bodisats, 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 Bodisats 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
Pundarīka, that the latter work is much the younger of
the two, a conclusion supported also by other considerations.
Among the Bodisats mentioned in the Saddharma Pundanka, and not mentioned in the Lalita Vistara, as attendant on the Buddha are Manju-srī and Avalokitesvara. 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 Hian, 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, very naturally, 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 Brahmanical 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 Bodisats; and to have paid especial reverence to Manju-srī as the personification of wisdom, and to Avalokiteswara as the personification of overruling love. The latter indeed occupies in the Mahāyāna very much the position which the old Brahmanical god Brahma, the First Cause of the Brahmanical speculation, had been allowed to retain in primitive Buddhism. The former was afterwards identified with the mythical first Buddhist missionary, who is supposed in the legend 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 which men could themselves practise, to a belief in a whole pantheon of saints or angels, which appealed more strongly to the half- civilized 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 represent ing them as only the outward appearance, the reflexion, 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 of course to have their Bodisats ; 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 Bodisat. 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 Avalokiteswara, his Bodisat, was looked upon with a reverence somewhat less than his former glory. It is needless to add that, under the overpowering
- ↑ Edited by Dr V. Trenekner, London, 1880.
