[191] At critical moments in the lives of persons of importance in the religious legends of Buddhist India, the seat of the Archangel Sakka becomes warm. Fearful of losing his temporary bliss, he then descends himself, or sends Vissakamma, the Buddhist Vulcan, to act as a deus ex machinâ, and put things straight.
[192] The force of this passage is due to the fullness of meaning which, to the Buddhist, the words NIBBUTA and NIBBĀNAŊ convey. No words in Western languages cover exactly the same ground, or connote the same ideas. To explain them fully to any one unfamiliar with Indian modes of thought would be difficult anywhere, and impossible in a note; but their meaning is pretty clear from the above sentences. Where in them, in the song, the words blessed, happy, peace, and the words gone out, ceased, occur, NIBBUTA stands in the original in one or other of its two meanings; where in them the words Nirvāna, Nirvāna of Peace occur, NIBBĀNAŊ stands in the original. Nirvāna is a lasting state of happiness and peace, to be reached here on earth by the extinction of the ‘fires’ and ‘troubles’ mentioned in this passage.
[193] Literally, “The three Bhavas seemed like houses on fire.” The three Bhavas are Existence in the Kāma-loka, and the Rūpa-loka and the Arūpa-loka respectively: that is, existence in the worlds whose inhabitants are subject to passion, have material forms, and have immaterial forms respectively.
[194] Literally, “about an ammaṇa (i.e. five or six bushels) of the large jasmine and the Arabian jasmine.”
[195] The Jātaka Commentary here referred to is, no doubt, the older commentary in Elu, or old Siŋhalese, on which the present work is based.
[196] The word rendered league is yojana, said by Childers (Dictionary, s.v.) to be twelve miles, but really only between seven and eight miles. See my Ancient Coins and Measures, pp. 16, 17. The thirty yojanas here mentioned, together with the thirty from Kapilavastu to the river Anomā, make together sixty, or four hundred and fifty miles from Kapilavastu to Rājagaha, which is far too much for the direct distance. There is here, I think, an undesigned coincidence between Northern and Southern accounts; for the Lalita Vistara (Chap. xvi. at the commencement) makes the Bodisat go to Rājagaha viâ Vesāli, and this would make the total distance exactly sixty yojanas.
[197] These are the superhuman Snakes and Winged Creatures, who were supposed, like the gods or angels, to be able to assume the appearance of men.
[198] Samāpatti.
[199] The Great Struggle played a great part in the Buddhist system of moral training; it was the wrestling with the flesh by which a true Buddhist overcame delusion and sin, and attained to Nirvāna. It is best explained by its fourfold division into 1. Mastery over the passions. 2. Suppression of sinful thoughts. 3. Meditation on the seven kinds of Wisdom (Bodhi-angā, see ‘Buddhism’ p. 173); and 4. Fixed attention, the power of preventing the mind from wandering. It is also called Sammappadhāna, Right Effort, and forms the subject of the Mahā-Padhāna Sutta, in the Dīgha Nikāya. The system was, of course, not worked out at the time here referred to; but throughout the chronicle the biographer ascribes to Gotama, from the beginning, a knowledge of the whole Buddhist theory as afterwards elaborated. For to our author that theory had no development, it was Eternal and Immutable Truth already revealed by innumerable previous Buddhas.
[200] The fruit of the Palmyra (Borassus Flabelliformis) has always three seeds. I do not understand the allusion to a one-seeded Palmyra.