"I take refuge in Buddha,
I take refuge in the Dharma,
I take refuge in the Sangha"—
that is, in the Prophet, the Law, and the Church. These afterwards were interpreted to stand for the Self-Existent, the Son (Logos) or Sophia (Wisdom), and the Holy Ghost (or uniting principle).
Gotama has also been said to possess three personalities, and every one of them is of equal importance.[K] "There is the Dhârma Kâya; there is the Nirmâna Kâya; there is the Sambhôga Kâya. Buddha is the all-excellent truth, eternal, omnipresent, and immutable; this is the Sambhôga Kâya, which is in a perfect state of bliss. Buddha is the all-loving teacher, assuming the shape of the beings whom he teaches; this is the Nirmâna Kâya, his apparitional body. Buddha is the all-blessed dispensation of religion; he is the spirit of the Sangha and the meaning of the commands which he has left us in his sacred word, the Dhârma; this is the Dhârma Kâya, the body of the most excellent law."
"It was proclaimed," says Mr. Lillie, "that Gotama possessed a superfluity of good Karma, or Righteousness, which was available for all men to partake of, whereby salvation might be had." He quotes from the Bible as a parallel to this idea: "By the righteousness of one the free gifts came upon all men unto justification of life"; also: "By the obedience of one shall many be made righteous."
To be saved by "the blood" in a realistic sense is another way very much accentuated by St. Paul. To be saved through "faith in the blood" has been taken to mean, by some interpreters, through faith in the genealogy, or divine stock, from which Jesus traced his descent, as well as through "faith in the life" (which is the blood)—that is, by following the life-example of the Son, in contradistinction to the idea of salvation through a materialistic reliance on the details of a violent death.
The doctrine of Predestination, which holds such a prominent position in Christian theology, cannot be excluded altogether from a consideration of Buddhistic philosophy, in which, however, it bears a somewhat different signification. Although both Jesus and Gotama made use of the language of "free-will" as we talk of to-morrow, which never is, one is forced to conclude that, by virtue of their position as manifestations of the Logos, they were both aware of the scientific certainty of the non-existence of what is commonly understood as "free-will." The very fact of the law of causation being the pivot around which Buddhist philosophy revolves seems to assure us that this was, in the knowledge of Gotama, the central law of the Kosmos, and such that it could not be affected by the will of an individual who was not an independent individual, but simply part and parcel of the molecular contents of the apparitional world.
As Gotama recognized that the mind and sense of humanity were so deeply ingrained with the notion of free-will, he was constrained to use the argumentum ad hominem, and outwardly base his ethical system on a free-will which seemed natural to humanity to believe in, but which was nevertheless a delusion.