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THE REV. W. ST. CLAIE TISDALL, D.D., ON 



account of Mahayana teaching, as far as its main tenets are 

 concerned, apart from the beliefs and practices which the 

 popular forms of the religion have assimilated from Taoism and 

 other Chinese beliefs. His version of Asvaghosha's Awakening 

 of Faith enables us to test his statements. Further indis- 

 putable information is afforded by Beat's and other translations 

 of Buddhist works, translated from Sanskrit into Chinese many 

 centuries ago. We refer to these rather than to the original 

 Sanskrit works themselves, because our business is not now to 

 trace the gradual development of early Buddhism in India into 

 the extinct Indian form of Mahayanism, but rather to learn 

 what Chi/us*: Mahayanism really is, and whether there is any 

 justification for the statement that it is almost identical with 

 Christianity except in the terms which it employs. 



Were this so, we should have good cause to rejoice ; but for 

 that very reason it is the more needful to be on our guard 

 against making a mistake about the matter. We therefore in 

 the first place turn to what Suzuki tells us as to the leading 

 doctrines of Mahayana Buddhism. 



According to him, the nearest approach in the religion to a 

 belief in God is the theory of the existence of the Dharmakaya. 

 " Buddhism does not use the word God . . . Buddhism out- 

 spokenly acknowledges the presence in the world of a reality 

 which transcends the limits of phenomenality, but which is 

 nevertheless immanent everywhere, and manifests itself in its 

 full glory. God or the religious object of Buddhism is generally 

 called Dharmakaya-Buddha and occasionally Yairocana-Buddha 

 or Yairocana-Dharmakaya -Buddha ; still another name for it is 

 Amitabha-Buddha or Amitayur-Buddha, the two latter being 

 mostly used by the followers of the Sukhavati sect of Japan and 

 China. Again, very frequently we find §akyamuni, the Buddha 

 and the Tathagata, stripped of his historical personality and 

 identified with the highest truth and reality . . . Dharmakaya 

 means the organized totality of things, or the principle of cosmic 

 unity, though not as a purely philosophical concept, but as an 

 object of the religious consciousness.' 7 * He proceeds to quote 

 the following passage from the Avatamsaka Sutra, ft which gives 

 a comprehensive statement about the nature of the Dharmakaya 

 in these words: J" The Dharmakaya, though manifesting itself 

 in the triple world, is free from impurities and desires. It 



* Outlines of Mahayana Buddh ism, pp. 219, 220. 

 t Chinese version. 



% Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism, pp. 223, 224. 



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