Note 117 — Chapter X · THE DOCTRINE OF TRIKÂYA.

To sum up, the Buddha in the Pâli scriptures was a human being, though occasionally he is credited to have achieved things supernatural and superhuman. His historical career began with the abandonment of a royal life, then the wandering in the wilderness, and a long earnest meditation on the great problems of birth-and-death, and his final enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, then his fifty years’ religious peregrination along the valleys of the Ganges, and the establishment of a religious system known as Buddhism, and finally his eternal entrance into the “Parinirvâna that leaves nothing behind” (anupadhiçeṣanirvâna). And as far as plain historical facts are concerned, these seem to exhaust the life of Çâkyamuni on earth. But the deep reverence which was felt by his disciples could not be satisfied with this prosaic humanness of their master and made him something more than a mortal soul. So even the Pâli tradition gives him a supramundane life besides the earthly one. He is supposed to have been a Bodhisattva in the Tuṣita heaven before his entrance into the womb of Mâyâdevî. The honor of Bodhisattvahood was acceded to him on account of his deeds of self-sacrifice which were praised throughout his innumerable past incarnations. While he was walking among us in the flesh, he was glorified with the thirty-two major and eighty minor excellent characteristics of a great man.[117] But he was not the first Buddha that walked on earth to teach the Dharma, for there were already seven Buddhas before him, nor was he the last one that would appear among us, for a Bodhisattva by the name of Maitreya is now in heaven and making preparations for the attainment of Buddhahood in time to come. But here stopped the Pâli writers, they did not venture to make any further speculation on the nature of Buddhahood. Their religious yearnings did not spur them to a higher flight of the imagination. They recited simple sûtras or gâthâs, observed the çilas (moral precepts) as strictly and literally as they could, and thought the spirit of their Master still alive in these instructions;—let alone the personality of the Tathâgata.