There is even a tendency to press the saints of other countries into the service. This is remarkably exemplified in the history of Barlaam and Josaphat, current in Europe in the Middle Ages. The zealous Roman Catholics of those days thought that they could not exclude so noble a monk as Buddha from the catalogue of their own saints, and so they registered him in their list as St. Josaphat (Josaphat being a corruption of Bodhisat). Colonel Yule, in his Marco Polo, states that a church in Palermo is dedicated to this saint.
And here mention may be made of a modern deified Hindū teacher or sage, named Gorakh-nāth, who is said to have gone from India into Nepāl, and is worshipped there as well as at Gorakh-pur and throughout the Panjāb. Very little is known about him, and he belongs more to Hindūism than to Buddhism. Some say that he was a contemporary of Kabīr (1488-1512), and, according to a Janamsākhī, he once had an interview with Nānak, the founder of the Sikh sect. Such legendary accounts as are current are wrapped in much mystery. One legend describes him as born from a lotus.
Others describe him as the third or fourth in a series of Ṡaiva teachers, and the founder of the Kānphāṭā sect of Yogīs. The remarkable thing about him is that he succeeded in achieving an extraordinary degree of popularity among Northern Hindūs and among some adherents of Buddhism in Nepāl. His tomb is in the Panjāb, and he is to this day adored as a kind of god by immense numbers of the inhabitants of North Western India under the hills.
But the canonization of such historical teachers in India and their elevation to semi-divine rank did not satisfy the craving of the uneducated masses, either among Buddhists or Hindūs, for personal deities, possessed of powers over human affairs far greater than any departed human beings, however eminent. In Buddhism the supposed existence of the more god-like Bodhi-sattva Maitreya—venerated by both the Mahā-yāna and the Hīna-yāna schools—was not sufficient to satisfy this craving.
Hence the ‘Great Vehicle’ soon began to teach the existence of numerous mythological Bodhi-sattvas, other than Maitreya, to whom no historical character belonged, but whose functions were more divine.
LECTURE IX.
Theistic and Polytheistic Buddhism.
In the preceding Lecture I have endeavoured to sketch the rise of theistic and polytheistic Buddhism.
We have now to turn our attention to its development, especially in regard to the worship of mythical Bodhi-sattvas, and of the Hindū gods and other mythological beings.
Some of the Bodhi-sattvas of the Mahā-yāna or Great System were merely quasi-deifications of eminent saints and teachers. Others were impersonations of certain qualities or forces; and just as in early Buddhism we have the simple triad of the Buddha, his Law, and his Order, so in Northern Buddhism the worship of mythical Bodhi-sattvas—other than Maitreya—was originally confined to a triad, namely (1) Mañju-ṡrī, ‘he of beautiful glory;’ (2) Avalokiteṡvara, ‘the looking-down lord,’ often called Padma-pāṇi, ‘the lotus-handed;’ (3) Vajra-pāṇi or Vajra-dhara, ‘the thunderbolt-handed.’
These three mythical Bodhi-sattvas were not known to early Buddhists, nor to the Buddhists of Ceylon. They are not even found in the oldest books of the Northern School (such as the Lalita-vistara), though they occur conspicuously in the Saddharma-puṇḍarīka.