Note 101 — Chapter IX · THE DHARMAKÂYA.

Those spiritual influences over all beings of the Dharmakâya through the enlightened mind of a Buddha, which we have seen above as stated by Asanga, are fraught with religious significance. According to the Buddhist view, those spiritual powers everlastingly emanating from the Body of Dharma have no trace of human elaboration or constrained effort, but they are a spontaneous overflow from its immanent necessity, or, as I take it, from its free will. The Dharmakâya does not make any conscious, struggling efforts to shower upon all sentient creatures its innumerable merits, benefits, and blessings. If there were in it any trace of elaboration, that would mean a struggle within itself of divers tendencies, one trying to gain ascendency over another. And it is apparent that any struggle and its necessary ally, compulsion, are incompatible with our conception of the highest religious reality. Absolute spontaneity and perfect freedom is one of those necessary attributes which our religious consciousness cannot help ascribing to its object of reverence. Buddhists therefore repeatedly affirm that the activity of the Dharmakâya is perfectly free from all effort and coercion, external and internal. Its every act of creation or salvation or love emanates from its own free will, unhampered by any struggling exertion which characterises the doings of mankind. This free will which is divine, standing in such a striking contrast with our own “free will” which is human and at best very much limited, is called by the Buddhists the Dharmakâya’s “Purvapranidhânabala.”[101]