Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c24.s9.8

c24.s9.8

The process is somewhat unkind to Çākyamuni. Some at least regard him with less than complete favour; his paradise is only just above the regions of the sensual gods, of men, animals, and hell beings; his universe is composed of evil as well as good. There is, however, a deity who reigns over a paradise of bliss, Sukhāvatī, peopled with the elect and the saints, who, miraculously conceived, grow in the hearts of lotuses, nourished by the echo of the divine teaching, and emerge grown to manhood, when the rays of the Buddha have brought the flowers to opening. The lord of this realm is Amitābha or Amitāyus, sovereign of the land of the setting sun, himself a relic of sun worship; to meditate on the sun is the mode of attaining the revelation of the realm of Amitābha. It is interesting once more to find the sun motive entering into Buddhist mythology. But Amitābha has attained his position by special endeavours; long ages ago as the monk Dharmākara he took the vow in the presence of the then reigning Buddha, Lokeçvararāja, to become one day a Buddha, and to rule a realm peopled by saints and without suffering. The results of this vow, matured by ages of charity and meditation, were the appearance of Dharmākara as Amitābha, of his paradise, and of the potency which brings there the elect to birth. The spiritual merit of Amitābha is sufficient, transferred to others, to secure that even the most evil, by merely uttering the name of Amitābha, perhaps but in blasphemy, are reborn in paradise; the gravest punishment inflicted, even on those whose crimes would normally be rewarded by immediate precipitation into hell, is but delay in the opening of the lotus wombs, in which they grow until they have been duly reformed by the sound of the divine instruction. But such extravagance of view, familiar in Brahmanic religion, does not go unreproved; others hold that those who commit great sins are excluded, or demand piety and good works, or at least the appropriation by faith of the original vow of the god.¹