Bodhisattva

“ Apart from six figures of undetermined lesser Bodhisattvas, some of whom carry sacred vessels, the cortège of either comprises four youthful musicians playing on clappers, pipe, flute, and mouth-organ. In front of them marches a dark-coloured boy, undoubtedly meant for an Indian, carrying a bronze vessel, while another strides by the side of the chief Bodhisattva, leading his mount. The exaggerated dark colour of these Indians is, like the misdrawing of the elephant’s head and limbs, significant of the painter’s want of familiarity with things Indian. ”

“ He must be a being highly endowed with wisdom. If it was the same boy who appeared every day so gifted, I should hold him to be a Bodhisattva or indeed a very Buddha; but as on different days different boys attain to the same sagacity, the source must remain one and the same for all. Shall it not be that on the foundations of this hill or mound is a stupa, where Buddhas or Bodhisattvas have propounded sacred teaching to men. Or shall it be that there lies hidden therein some treasure gifted to impart wisdom to mortals? [262] In some way of a certainty the spot is endowed with singular gifts. ”

“ And as a muttering of mountain thunder came a voice, saying: "The Buddha shall not live by thine alms-gift; his hour hath come.... Mine is the fire between thee and him."
And the Bodhisattva looked at the Buddha across the abyss of fire; and the Buddha's face changed not, neither did he utter a word to dissuade nor give one sign to encourage.
But the Bodhisattva cried aloud, even while the abyss, widening, grew vaster to devour him: "Mara, thou shalt not prevail! To thee power is not given against duty!... My lord Buddha, I come to thee, fearing not ”

“ Bodhisattva diligently applied himself to "means," as one about to cross over old age, disease, and death. With full purpose of heart he set himself to endure mortification, to restrain every bodily passion, and give up thought about sustenance, with purity of heart to observe the fast-rules, which no worldly man can bear; silent and still, lost in thoughtful meditation; and so for six years he continued, each day eating one hemp grain, his bodily form shrunken and attenuated, seeking how to cross the sea of birth and death, exercising himself still deeper and advancing further ”

“ The Bodhisattva is the ideal Kshatriya King of the Mahābhārata who has learnt to subdue himself, so that he may dispense divine justice and become God's Vicegerent on earth. But he fights only with spiritual weapons which, like those of the great Aryan heroes, are personified and made to take places in the Buddhist pantheon as various manifestations of the Bodhisattva, e.g. ”

“ Vow 37 When I obtain the Buddhahood, the heavenly beings of boundless and inconceivable Buddha-worlds of the ten quarters, having heard my name, should not worship me with prostrate reverence, and joyfully and faithfully perform their Bodhisattva-duty, and be honoured by gods and men, then may I not attain the enlightenment. ”

“ In the Jataka stories, or Birth tales, "the Buddha elect" is the title given to each of the beings, man, angel, or animal, who is held to be a Bodhisattva, or the future Buddha in one of his former births. The title Bodhisattva19 is the name given to a being whose Karma will produce other beings in a continually ascending scale of goodness until it becomes vested in a Buddha. Or, in the more common use of {170} the word, a Bodhisattva (Japanese bosatsu) is a being whose essence has become intelligence, and who will have to pass through human existence once more only before entering Nirvana. ”

“ Śântideva's Bodhisattva, when conceiving the thought of Bodhi or eventual supreme enlightenment to be obtained, it may be, only after numberless births, feels first a sympathetic joy in the good actions of all living beings. He addresses to the Buddhas a prayer which is not a mere act of commemoration, but a request to preach the law and to defer their entrance into Nirvana. He then makes over to others whatever merit he may possess or acquire and offers himself and all his possessions, moral and material, as a sacrifice for the salvation of all beings. ”

“ And being subdued in spirit by the practice of that law, he asked that mendicant to teach him the rule for the discipline leading to the rank of a Bodhisattva, a rule which involves benefits to all. And the mendicant said to him; “King, the great discipline of a Bodhisattva is to be performed by those who are free from sin, and by no others. Now you are not tainted with any sin which is palpable, and therefore visible to men like myself, but find out by the following method, if you have any minute sin, and so destroy it.” ”

“ The world without instruction, poisoned by lust and hate and ignorance; because he pitied 'flesh,' so circumstanced, he sought on their account the joy of wisdom. Why then would you molest and hinder one who seeks to banish sorrow from the world? The ignorance that everywhere prevails is due to false pernicious books, and therefore Bodhisattva, walking uprightly, would lead and draw men after him. To obscure and blind the great world-leader, this undertaking is impossible, for 'tis as though in the Great Desert a man would purposely mislead the merchant-guide. ”

“ Thou, young man of good family, hast been superintended by thousands of Buddhas; thine equal, young man of good family, is not to be found in the world, including the gods [26] , with the only exception of the TatMgata; there is no other, be he disciple, Pratyekabuddha, or Bodhisattva, able to surpass thee in pious merit, knowledge, wisdom or meditation. Such a power of knowledge, Nakshatrarâgasaṅkusumitâbhigña, will be acquired by that Bodhisattva. ”

“ Considering thus, one ought to strive after the realisation of virtues; as will be taught in the following.
One time the Bodhisattva is said to have been a king's treasurer, illustrious for his learning, his noble family and his modest behaviour. He had lofty aspirations and a clever intellect, loved honest practices in business, and owing to his thorough study of many branches of science, attracted notice by his elegance of speech. Compassionate as he was and in the possession of a large estate, he made the bliss of his wealth flow in all directions by his great gifts of charity. ”

“ The doctrines attributed to the Uttarâpathakas and Andhakas respectively that an unconverted man, if good, is capable of entering on the career of a Bodhisattva and that a Bodhisattva can in the course of his career fall into error and be reborn in state of woe, show an interest in the development of a Bodhisattva and a desire to bring it nearer to human life which are foreign to the Pitakas. ”

“ With this particular definition before us, and bearing in mind the general substance of the Mahayana faith, we may perhaps appreciate the sense in which the distinguished missionary, Dr Richard of Shanghai, ventured to render the Chinese term Ju-Lai (Buddha) , in a translation of Asvaghocha’s The Awakening of Faith, by the English synonym God. Few Christians would controvert the statement that God, is the One in whom all Laws become intelligible!
8 “And if a Bodhisattva were to say: ‘I shall deliver all beings,’ he ought not to be called a Bodhisattva. ”

“ Thus hath it been heard by me, that once on a time Bhagavat sojourned in the garden of Anâthapindada, at Getavana, in Srâvastî, [207] accompanied by a venerable body of 12,000 Bhikshukas. There likewise accompanied him 32,000 Bodhisattvas, all linked together by unity of caste, and perfect in the virtues of pâramitâ; who had made their command over Bodhisattva knowledge a pastime, were illumined with the light of Bodhisattva dhâranîs, and were masters of the dhâranîs themselves ”

“ A Bôdhisattva, on the other hand, has still to pass once more through human existence before attaining to Buddhahood. Readers will scarcely need to be told that "Buddha" was never the personal name of any one man. ”

“ The Bodhisattva, as yet unidentified, stands in a peculiar pose not elsewhere represented among our paintings. He stands on an open lotus, with the raised right hand holding at shoulder level a round bowl of mottled green glass with a metal rim. The head is turned three-quarters towards the bowl, while the left hand hangs down by the side. As the weight of the body is carried on the right leg and the body slightly inclines from the right hip towards the left shoulder, attention is cleverly drawn by the pose to the object which the right hand supports. ”

“ However large may be in devout speculation the number of different Bodhisattvas, popular imagination had already in the North-Indian home of the Mahāyāna system been concentrated upon a small select group of Bodhisattvas. Among them Avalokiteśvara, the Bodhisattva of Mercy, occupies the foremost place, and the frequency of his representations among our Tun-huang paintings is just as marked as the popularity of his female manifestation, known to the Chinese as Kuan-yin, to the Japanese as Kwannon, the Goddess of Pity, is in modern Buddhist worship throughout the Far East. ”

“ At that time, after the Lord had spoken, Elder Śāriputra and Avalokiteśvara Bodhisattva-mahāsattva both experienced great bliss. Then the multitude of devas, humans, asuras, and gandharvas heard what the Buddha had truly said. With great bliss, they believed, accepted, and practiced in accordance. ”

“ See, O Ajita, the excellent, immeasurable, unfailing, unlimited wisdom, that namely for their own benefit they are deprived during five hundred years of seeing Buddhas, seeing Bodhisattvas, hearing the Dharma, speaking about the Dharma with others, and thus collecting a stock of merit; they are indeed deprived of the successful attainment of every stock of merit, and that, through their forming ideas tainted with doubt. ”

“ And those noble-minded Bodhisattvas, O Ajita, who, living in other Buddha countries, raise their thought in order to see Amitabha, the Tathagata, holy and fully enlightened, who never entertain a doubt, believe in the perfect knowledge of Buddha and in their own stock of merit, for them, being born miraculously, and appearing cross-legged, there is in one minute, such a body as that of other beings who have been born there long before. ”

“ Unless we can make a verbal contrast and assert that there is something which does exist, it seems futile to insist on the unreality of the world. Yet this mode of thought is not confined to text-books on logic. It invades the scriptures, and appears (for instance) in the Diamond Cutter [106] which is still one of the most venerated books of devotion in China and Japan. In this work the Buddha explains that a Bodhisattva must resolve to deliver all living beings and yet must understand that after he has thus delivered innumerable beings, no one has been delivered. ”

“ Higher than piety is true and self-acquired knowledge of the eternal laws; higher than knowledge is devoting oneself to the spiritual weal of others [44] . The higher unity embracing the three separate Vehicles is the Buddha-vehicle.
The title of Bodhisattva is not always used in the same acceptation. Apart from a broad distinction we can draw between human and superhuman Bodhisattvas 1 — the latter are here left out of account — we find sometimes the word applied to those persons who in the passage of our Sutra alluded to are styled Sr&vakas, hearers, learners. ”

“ But if we admit that the career of the Buddha is better and nobler, and also that it is, as the Introduction to the Jâtaka recounts, simply the result of an earnest resolution to school himself and help others, kept firmly through the long chain of existences, there is nothing illogical or presumptuous in making our goal not the quest of personal salvation, but the attainment of Bodhisattvaship, that is the state of those who may aspire to become Buddhas. ”

“ Then the Bodhisattva Mahisattva Maitreya, feeling within himself doubt and perplexity, and inferring from his own thoughts those of the eight hundred thousand myriads of ko/is of Bodhisattvas similar to the sands of the river Ganges, stretched out his joined hands towards the Lord and questioned him about the matter by uttering the following stanzas :
5. Here are many thousand myriads of ko/is of Bodhisattvas, numberless, whom we never saw before; tell us, O supreme of men!
6. Whence and how do these mighty persons come? Whence have they come here under the form of great bodies? ”

“ All these two thousand monks, Ânanda, shall simultaneously accomplish the course of Bodhisattvas, and after honouring, respecting, venerating, worshipping Buddhas as numerous as the atoms of fifty worlds, and after acquiring the true law, they shall, in their last bodily existence, attain supreme and perfect enlightenment at the same time, the same moment, the same instant, the same juncture in all directions of space, in different worlds, each in his own Buddha-field. ”

“ By many hundreds of able devices they bring numerous Bodhisattvas to full ripeness and declare: We are but disciples, indeed, and we are far away from the highest and supreme enlightenment.
4. It is by learning from them this course (of duty) that kotis of beings arrive at full ripeness, who (at first) , lowly-disposed and somewhat lazy, in course of time all become Buddhas.
5. They follow a course in ignorance (thinking) : We, disciples, are of little use, indeed! In despondency they descend into all places of existence (successively) , and (so) clear their own field. ”

“ This (event) to-day will be hard to be understood by the ignorant who imagine they see [33] here a sign, as they are proud and dull. But the Bodhisattvas, they will listen to me.
131. And I felt free from hesitation and highly cheered; putting aside all timidity, I began speaking in the assembly of the sons of Sugata, and roused them to enlightenment.
132. On beholding such worthy sons of Buddha (I said) : Thy doubts also will be removed, and these twelve hundred (disciples) of mine, free from imperfections, will all of them become Buddhas. ”