Note f49 — ENLIGHTENMENT AND IGNORANCE

The idea that there were some more Buddhas in the past seems to have originated very early in the history of Buddhism as we may notice here, and its further development, combined with the idea of the Jātaka, finally culminated in the conception of a Bodhisattva, which is one of the characteristic features of Mahayana Buddhism.

The six Buddhas of the past later increased into twenty-three or twenty-four in the Buddha-vamsa and Prajñā-pāramitā and even into forty-two in the Lalita-vistara. This idea of having predecessors or forerunners seems to have been general among ancient peoples. In China, Confucius claimed to have transmitted his doctrine from Yao and Shun, and Laotzŭ from the Emperor Huang. In India, Jainism which has, not only in the teaching but in the personality of the founder, many similarities to Buddhism, mentions twenty-three predecessors, naturally more or less corresponding so closely to those of Buddhism.