The History of Buddhist Thought c22.6

c22.6

The doctrine taught in the Mahāyāna discourses varies according to the different schools, and even in the same school according to the aspect prominent in the mind of the compiler. In the *Lotus* it is the omniscience of the Buddhas, and the doctrine that all beings may attain the state of Buddha. This state is obtained by becoming a bodhisattva, and the bodhisattvas come to be the chief objects of religious enthusiasm. They are individualized as half-mythical beings who undertake to save the world, and then the advantages of worshipping and winning the favour of these great beings is extolled rather than the gigantic labour of becoming such a saviour. The Buddhas and bodhisattvas are conceived as mighty beneficent beings rivalling the gods of the surrounding Hinduism. They may not have been conceived as gods in the sense of the ultimate reality of things, but popular thought was not concerned with such problems. It sought objects of worship, and it found them in the Buddhas and bodhisattvas who became little else than the gods of the old polytheism under other names. The element of devotion (*bhakti*) was thus introduced into Buddhism. “Several scholars,” says La Vallée Poussin, “regard the origin of the devotion to the Buddhas as a real puzzle (Max Müller) and believe that it is to be found in the influence of the ‘barbarians’, notably the Mazdaeans—an influence which was exercised especially in Northern India, the Panjab, and Kashmir, where religious statuary reached such high development.”² There is no doubt about Persian influence in India, but religious devotion is a psychical phenomenon. It is a natural tendency of the soul to seek an object of religious love and worship, and it appears in any state of society when a suitable object for its exercise appears or is conceived. To imagine that the Buddhists were not devotional until Mazdaean influence penetrated India seems to be superfluous. They were surrounded by religions of devotional enthusiasm, and all that was needed was a transference of Kṛṣṇa-worship or Śiva-worship to these new deities, the bodhisattvas. What Mazdeism may conceivably have done was to introduce a knowledge of some of these beings. But even in the case of Amitābha, the Buddha of “infinite light”, who is sometimes supposed to be of Persian origin, there is no proof of borrowing. “The whole ‘theology’ of the religion of Amitābha is Indian.” The question of borrowing in fact only concerns details of archæology.