Judging from all these characterisations, the most plausible conclusion that suggests itself to modern sceptical minds is that the Sambhogakâya must be a mere creation of an intelligent, finite mind, which is intently bent on reaching the highest reality, but, not being able, on account of its limitations, to grasp the object in its absoluteness, the finite mind fabricates all its ideals after its own fashion into a spiritual-material being, which is logically a contradiction, but religiously an object deserving veneration and worship. And this being is no more than the Body of Bliss.[115] It lies half way between the pure being of Dharmakâya and the earthly form of Nirmânakâya, the Body of Transformation. It does not belong to either, but partakes something of both. It is in a sense spiritual like the Dharmakâya, and yet it cannot go beyond material limitations, for it has a form, definite and determinate. When the human soul is thirsty after a pure being or an absolute which cannot be comprehended in a palpable form, it creates a hybrid, an imitation, or a reflection, and tries to be satisfied with it, just as a little girl has her innate and not yet fully developed maternity satisfied by tenderly embracing and nursing the doll, an inanimate imitation of a real living baby. And the Mahâyânists seem to have made most of this childish humanness. They produced as many sûtras as their spiritual yearnings demanded, quite regardless of historical facts, and made the Body of Bliss of the Tathâgata the author of all these works. For if the Dharmakâya of the Tathâgata never entered into Parinirvâna, why then could he not deliver sermons and cite gâthâs as often as beings of intelligence (Bodhisattvas) felt their needs? The Suvarna Prabhâ (fas. 2, chap. 3) again echoes this sentiment as follows:
“To illustrate by analogy, the sun or the moon does not make any conscious discrimination, nor does the water-mirror, nor the light [conceived separate from the body from which it emanates]. But when all these three are brought together, there is produced an image [of the sun or the moon in the water]. So it is with Suchness and Knowledge of Suchness. It is not possessed of any particular consciousness, but by virtue of the Spontaneous Will [inherent in the nature of Suchness, or what is the same thing, in the Dharmakâya], the Body of Transformation or of Bliss [as a shadow of the Dharmakâya] reveals itself in response to the spiritual needs of sentient beings.
“And, again, as the water-mirror boundlessly expanding reflects in all different ways the images of âkâsa (void space) through the medium of light, while space itself is void of all particular marks, so the Dharmakâya reflects its images severally in the receiving minds of believers, and this by virtue of Spontaneous Will. The Will creates the Body of Transformation as well as the Body of Bliss in all their possible aspects, while the original, the Dharmakâya, does not suffer one whit a change on this account.”
According to this, it is evident that whenever our spiritual needs become sufficiently intense there is a response from the Dharmakâya, and that this response is not always uniform as the recipient minds show different degrees of development, intellectually and spiritually. If we call this communion between sentient souls and the Dharmakâya an inspiration, all the phenomena that flow out of fulness of heart and reflect purity of soul should be called “works of inspiration”; and in this sense the Mahâyânists consider their scriptures as emanating directly from the fountainhead of the Dharmakâya.
Attitude of Modern Mahâyânists.
Modern Mahâyânists in full accordance with this interpretation of the Doctrine of Trikâya do not place much importance on the objective aspects of the Body of Bliss (Sambhogakâya). They consider them at best the fictitious products of an imaginative mind; they never tarry a moment to think that all these mysterious Tathâgatas or Bodhisattvas who are sometimes too extravagantly and generally too tediously described in the Mahâyâna texts are objective realities, that the Sukhâvatîs or Pure Lands[116] are decorated with such worldly stuff as gold, silver, emerald, cat’s eye, pearl, and other precious stones, that pious Buddhists would be transferred after their death to these ostentatiously ornamented heavens, be seated on the pedestals of lotus-flowers, surrounded by innumerable Bodhisattvas and Buddhas, and would enjoy all the spiritual enjoyments that human mind can conceive. On the contrary, modern Buddhists look with disdain on these egotistic materialistic conceptions of religious life. For, to a fully enlightened soul, of what use could those worldly treasures be? What happiness, earthly or heavenly, does such a soul dream of, outside the bliss of embracing the will of the Dharmakâya as his own?
Recapitulation.
To sum up, the Buddha in the Pâli scriptures was a human being, though occasionally he is credited to have achieved things supernatural and superhuman. His historical career began with the abandonment of a royal life, then the wandering in the wilderness, and a long earnest meditation on the great problems of birth-and-death, and his final enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, then his fifty years’ religious peregrination along the valleys of the Ganges, and the establishment of a religious system known as Buddhism, and finally his eternal entrance into the “Parinirvâna that leaves nothing behind” (anupadhiçeṣanirvâna). And as far as plain historical facts are concerned, these seem to exhaust the life of Çâkyamuni on earth. But the deep reverence which was felt by his disciples could not be satisfied with this prosaic humanness of their master and made him something more than a mortal soul. So even the Pâli tradition gives him a supramundane life besides the earthly one. He is supposed to have been a Bodhisattva in the Tuṣita heaven before his entrance into the womb of Mâyâdevî. The honor of Bodhisattvahood was acceded to him on account of his deeds of self-sacrifice which were praised throughout his innumerable past incarnations. While he was walking among us in the flesh, he was glorified with the thirty-two major and eighty minor excellent characteristics of a great man.[117] But he was not the first Buddha that walked on earth to teach the Dharma, for there were already seven Buddhas before him, nor was he the last one that would appear among us, for a Bodhisattva by the name of Maitreya is now in heaven and making preparations for the attainment of Buddhahood in time to come. But here stopped the Pâli writers, they did not venture to make any further speculation on the nature of Buddhahood. Their religious yearnings did not spur them to a higher flight of the imagination. They recited simple sûtras or gâthâs, observed the çilas (moral precepts) as strictly and literally as they could, and thought the spirit of their Master still alive in these instructions;—let alone the personality of the Tathâgata.
But there was at the same time another group of the disciples of the Buddha, whose religious and intellectual inclinations were not of the same type as their fellow-believers; and on that account a simple faith in the Buddha as present in his teachings did not quite satisfy them. They perhaps reasoned in this fashion: “If there were seven Buddhas before the advent of the Great Muni of Çakya and there would be one more who is to come, where, let us ask, did they derive their authority and knowledge to preach? How is it that there cannot be any more Buddhas, that they do not come to us much oftener? If they were human beings like ourselves, why not we ourselves be Buddhas?” These questions, when logically carried out, naturally led them to the theory of Dharmakâya, that all the past Buddhas, and those to come, and even we ordinary mortals made of clay and doomed to die soon, owe the raison d’être of their existence to the Dharmakâya, which alone is immortal in us as well as in Buddhas. The first religious effort we have to make is, therefore, to recognise this archetype of all Buddhas and all beings. But the Dharmakâya as such is too abstract for the average mind to become the object of its religious consciousness; so they personified or rather materialised it. In other words, they idealised Çâkyamuni, endowed him not only with the physical signs (lakṣas) of greatness as in the Pâli scriptures, but with those of celestial transfiguration, and called him a Body of Bliss of the Tathâgata; while the historical human Buddha was called a Body of Transformation and all sentient beings Bodhisattvas, that is, beings of intelligence destined to become Buddhas.
This idealised Buddha, or, what is the same thing, a personified Dharmakâya, according to the Mahâyâna Buddhists, not only revealed himself in the particular person of Siddhârtha Gautama in Central Asia a few thousand years ago, but is revealing himself in all times and all places. There is no specially favored spot on the earth where only the Buddha makes his appearance; from the zenith of Akaniṣta heaven down to the bottom of Nâraka, he is manifesting uninterruptedly and unintermittently and is working out his ideas, of which, however, our limited understanding is unable to have an adequate knowledge. The Avatamsaka Sûtra (Buddhabhadra’s translation, fas. 45, chap. 34) describes how the Buddha works out his scheme of salvation in all possible ways. (See also the Saddharma pundarîka, Kern’s translation, chap. 2, p. 30 et seq., and also pp. 413-411.).