260 



THE EEV. W. ST. CLAIR TISDALL, D.D., ON 



It is a very remarkable thing that Buddha, who taught a 

 philosophy in which there was no room for a God, should 

 ultimately after his death himself have been deified. The reason, 

 doubtless, is that man needs a deity of some kind, and that this 

 need asserted itself, not only in the case of the great mass of his 

 followers, as their numbers grew, and as Asoka " caused those 

 who had been deemed gods in India to be held to be no gods," 

 but also in that of the more philosophically inclined among 

 them. Hence it gradually came to be held that " The Buddha* 

 never entered into Parinirvana ; the good dharma will never 

 perish. He showedf an earthly death merely lor the benefits 

 of sentient beings." This dogma is not found in the books of 

 the Hinayana school. It shows the first step in the deification 

 of the Tathagata. The word originally meant " He who came 

 as (others before him),"j: and even in Chinese translations of 

 Sanskrit works is used as a title of many, if not all, the other 

 Buddhas as well as Siddhartha. But in many Mahayanist books 

 it is employed as equivalent to Dharmakaya, the nearest 

 approach in that system to the idea of Deity. Hence the 

 idealized Buddha came to be regarded as a personal aspect 

 or manifestation of the philosophical concept known as 

 Dharmakaya. In this way he was supposed to have a " Triple 

 body," the three being called respectively the body of Trans- 

 formation (Nirmana-kaya), the body of Bliss (Sambhoga-kaya), 

 and the body of Dharma (Dharmakaya). In the first of these 

 he has the power of assuming whatever bodily forms he pleases, 

 the second is a corporeal existence in which he at the same 

 time fills the universe and enjoys great happiness, in the third 

 he is simply identical with the Dharmakaya. It is in the 

 second form that the members of the Sukhavati sect, to which 

 most Chinese Buddhists belong, now conceive of Buddha as 

 reigning in " The pure Land " in the Western Paradise, a region 

 of bliss, where the pious hope to find Atuitabha (or Amida) 

 Buddha, surrounded by a vast number of other Buddhas and 

 Bodhisattvas, and to enjoy an existence of unalloyed, if somewhat 

 material, bliss. It is strange that some writers have ventured 



* Op. cit., p. 254. 



t Of., the doctrine of the Docetic heresy in early Christian days. 



J See below for fuller consideration of its import. The explanation 

 given in the Vajracchedika does not make the matter very clear. The 

 name Tathagata is there said to " express true Suchness, the absence of 

 origin, the destruction of all qualities," and to be suitable because "na 

 origin is the highest goal " {Sacred Books of the East, vol. xvii). 



