The History of Buddhist Thought c26.62

c26.62

It was this theory which made it possible to combine the dharmakāya with the two other bodies into a theory of the triple body. In popular buddhology the Buddhas continue to exist in a state of bliss. They attain even as bodhisattvas a glorious body. This is the body of enjoyment, even before it was called so. For the transformation body the Yogāchāras already had before them the doctrine of a mind-formed body, and the Mahāsanghika doctrine that Buddha’s whole earthly existence was nothing more than this. The trikāya theory was only a systematizing of the already existing doctrines. As Suzuki says, it was probably not until the Yogāchāra philosophy began to be crystallized into a system by Asanga and his predecessors that the conception of the triple body came to form a part of their programme.