Among the Bodhisats mentioned in the Saddharma Puṇḍarīka, and not mentioned in the Lalita Vistara, as attendant on the Buddha are Mañju-śrī and Avalokiteśvara. That these saints were already acknowledged by the followers of the Great Vehicle at the beginning of the 5th century is clear from the fact that Fa Hien, who visited India about that time, says that “men of the Great Vehicle” were then worshipping them at Mathura, not far from Delhi (F. H., chap. xvi.). These were supposed to be celestial beings who, inspired by love of the human race, had taken the so-called Great Resolve to become future Buddhas, and who therefore descended from heaven when the actual Buddha was on earth, to pay reverence to him, and to learn of him. The belief in them probably arose out of the doctrine of the older school, which did not deny the existence of the various creations of previous mythology and speculation, but allowed of their actual existence as spiritual beings, and only deprived them of all power over the lives of men, and declared them to be temporary beings liable, like men, to sin and ignorance, and requiring, like men, the salvation of Arahatship. Among them the later Buddhists seem to have placed their numerous Bodhisats; and to have paid especial reverence to Mañju-śrī as the personification of wisdom, and to Avalokiteśwara as the personification of overruling love. The former was afterwards identified with the mythical first Buddhist missionary, who is supposed to have introduced civilization into Tibet about two hundred and fifty years after the death of the Buddha.
The way was now open to a rapid fall from the simplicity of early Buddhism, in which men’s attention was directed to the various parts of the system of self-culture, to a belief in a whole pantheon of saints or angels, The five mystic trinities. which appealed more strongly to the half-civilized races among whom the Great Vehicle was now professed. A theory sprang up which was supposed to explain the marvellous powers of the Buddhas by representing them as only the outward appearance, the reflection, as it were, or emanation, of ethereal Buddhas dwelling in the skies. These were called Dhyāni Buddhas, and their number was supposed to be, like that of the Buddhas, innumerable. Only five of them, however, occupied any space in the speculative world in which the ideas of the later Buddhists had now begun to move. But, being Buddhas, they were supposed to have their Bodhisats; and thus out of the five last Buddhas of the earlier teaching there grew up five mystic trinities, each group consisting of one of these five Buddhas, his prototype in heaven the Dhyāni Buddha, and his celestial Bodhisat. Among these hypothetical beings, the creations of a sickly scholasticism, hollow abstractions without life or reality, the particular trinity in which the historical Gotama was assigned a subordinate place naturally occupied the most exalted rank. Amitābha, the Dhyāni-Buddha of this trinity, soon began to fill the largest place in the minds of the new school; and Avalokiteśwara, his Bodhisat, was looked upon with a reverence somewhat less than his former glory. It is needless to add that, under the overpowering influence of these vain imaginations, the earnest moral teachings of Gotama became more and more hidden from view. The imaginary saints grew and flourished. Each new creation, each new step in the theory, demanded another, until the whole sky was filled with forgeries of the brain, and the nobler and simpler lessons of the founder of the religion were hidden beneath the glittering stream of metaphysical subtleties.
Still worse results followed on the change of the earlier point of view. The acute minds of the Buddhist pandits, no longer occupied with the practical lessons of Arahatship, turned their attention, as far as it was not engaged upon their hierarchy of mythological beings, to questions of metaphysical speculation, which, in the earliest Buddhism, are not only discouraged but forbidden. We find long treatises on the nature of being, idealistic dreams which have as little to do with the Bodhisatship that is concerned with the salvation of the world as with the Arahatship that is concerned with the perfect life. Only one lower step was possible, and that was not long in being taken. The animism common alike to the untaught Huns and to their Hindu conquerors, but condemned in early Buddhism, was allowed to revive. As the stronger side of Gotama’s teaching was neglected, the debasing belief in rites and ceremonies, and charms and incantations, which had been the especial object of his scorn, began to spread like the Bīrana weed warmed by a tropical sun in marsh and muddy soil. As in India, after the expulsion of Buddhism, the degrading worship of Śiva and his dusky bride had been incorporated into Hinduism from the savage devil worship of Āryan and of non-Āryan tribes, so, as pure Buddhism died away in the north, the Tantra system, a mixture of magic and witchcraft and sorcery, was incorporated into the corrupted Buddhism.
The founder of this system seems to have been Asanga, an influential monk of Peshāwar, who wrote the first text-book of the creed, the Yogāchchāra Bhūmi Śāstra, in the 6th century A.D. Hsüan Tsang, who travelled in the first The Tantra system. half of the 7th, found the monastery where Asanga had lived in ruins, and says that he had lived one thousand years after the Buddha.[1] Asanga managed with great dexterity to reconcile the two opposing systems by placing a number of Śaivite gods or devils, both male and female, in the inferior heavens of the then prevalent Buddhism, and by representing them as worshippers and supporters of the Buddha and of Avalokiteśvara. He thus made it possible for the half-converted and rude tribes to remain Buddhists while they brought offerings, and even bloody offerings, to these more congenial shrines, and while their practical belief had no relation at all to the Truths or the Noble Eightfold Path, but busied itself almost wholly with obtaining magic powers (Siddhi), by means of magic phrases (Dhārani), and magic circles (Maṇḍala). Asanga’s happy idea bore but too ample fruit. In his own country and Nepāl, the new wine, sweet and luscious to the taste of savages, completely disqualified them from enjoying any purer drink; and now in both countries Śaivism is supreme, and Buddhism is even nominally extinct, except in some outlying districts of Nepāl. But this full effect has only been worked out in the lapse of ages; the Tantra literature has also had its growth and its development, and some unhappy scholar of a future age may have to trace its loathsome history. The nauseous taste repelled even the self-sacrificing industry of Burnouf, when he found the later Tantra books to be as immoral as they are absurd. “The pen,” he says, “refuses to transcribe doctrines as miserable in respect of form as they are odious and degrading in respect of meaning.”
Such had been the decline and fall of Buddhism considered as an ethical system before its introduction into Tibet. The manner in which its order of mendicant recluses, at first founded to afford better opportunities to those who wished to carry out that system in practical life, developed at last into a hierarchical monarchy will best be understood by a sketch of the history of Tibet.
Its real history commences with Srong Tsan Gampo, who was born a little after 600 A.D., and who is said in the Chinese chronicles to have entered, in 634, into diplomatic relationship with Tai Tsung, one of the emperors of Early political history. the Tang dynasty. He was the founder of the present capital of Tibet, now known as Lhasa; and in the year 622 (the same year as that in which Mahomet fled from Mecca) he began the formal introduction of Buddhism into Tibet. For this purpose he sent the minister Thumi Sambhota, afterwards looked upon as an incarnation of Mañju-śrī, to India, there to collect the sacred books, and to learn and translate them. Thumi Sambhota accordingly invented an alphabet for the Tibetan language on the model of the Indian alphabets then in use. And, aided by the king, who is represented to have been an industrious student and translator, he wrote the first books by which Buddhism became known in his native land. The most famous of the works ascribed to him is the Mani Kambum, “the Myriad of Precious Words”—a treatise chiefly on religion, but which also contains an account of the introduction of Buddhism into Tibet, and of the closing part of the life of Srong Tsan Gampo. He is also very probably the author of another very ancient standard work of Tibetan Buddhism, the Samatog, a short digest of Buddhist morality, on which the civil laws of Tibet have been founded. It is said in the Mani Kambum to have fallen from heaven in a casket (Tibetan, samatog), and, like the last-mentioned work, is only known to us in meagre abstract.
King Srong Tsan Gampo’s zeal for Buddhism was shared and supported by his two queens, Bribsun, a princess from Nepāl, and Wen Ching, a princess from China. They are related to have brought with them sacred relics, books and pictures, for whose better preservation two large monasteries were erected. These are the cloisters of La Brang (Jokhang) and Ra Moché, still, though much changed and enlarged, the most sacred abbeys in Tibet, and the glory of Lhasa. The two queens have become semi-divine personages, and are worshipped under the name of the two Dārā-Eke, the “glorious mothers,” being regarded as incarnations of the wife of Śiva, representing respectively two of the qualities which she personifies, divine vengeance and divine love. The former is worshipped by the Mongolians as Okkin Tengri, “the Virgin Goddess”; but in Tibet and China the rôle of the divine virgin is filled by Kwan Yin, a personification of Avalokiteśvara as the heavenly word, who is often represented with a child in her arms. Srong Tsan Gampo has also become a saint, being looked upon as an incarnation of Avalokiteśvara; and the description in the ecclesiastical historians of the measures he took for the welfare of his subjects do great credit to their ideal of the perfect Buddhist king. He is said to have spent his long reign in the building of reservoirs, bridges and canals; in the promotion of agriculture, horticulture and manufactures; in the establishment of schools and colleges; and in the maintenance of justice and the encouragement of virtue. But the degree of his success must have been slight. For after the death of himself and of his wives Buddhism gradually decayed, and was subjected by succeeding kings to cruel persecutions; and it was not till more than half a century afterwards, under King Kir Song de Tsan, who reigned 740-786, that true religion is acknowledged by the ecclesiastical historians to have become firmly established in the land.
This monarch again sent to India to replace the sacred books that had been lost, and to invite Buddhist pandits to translate them. The most distinguished of those who came were Śānta Rakshita, Padma Sambhava and Kamala The Tibetan sacred books. Śīla, for whom, and for their companions, the king built a splendid monastery still existing, at Samje, about three days’ journey south-east of Lhasa. It was to them that the Tibetans owed the great collection of what are still regarded as their sacred books—the Kandjur. It consists of 100 volumes containing 689 works, of which there are two or three complete sets in Europe, one of them in the India Office library. A detailed analysis of these scriptures has been published by the celebrated Hungarian scholar Csoma de Körös, whose authoritative work has been republished in French with complete indices and very useful notes by M. Léon Feer. These volumes contain about a dozen works of the oldest school of Buddhism, the Hīnayāna, and about 300 works, mostly very short, belonging to the Tantra school. But the great bulk of the collection consists of Mahāyāna books, belonging to all the previously existing varieties of that widely extended Buddhist sect; and, as the Sanskrit originals of many of these writings are now lost, the Tibetan translations will be of great value, not only for the history of Lāmāism, but also for the history of the later forms of Indian Buddhism.
The last king’s second son, Lang Darma, concluded in May 822 a treaty with the then emperor of China (the twelfth of the Tang dynasty), a record of which was engraved on a stone put up in the above-mentioned great convent of La Brang (Jokhang), and is still to be seen there.[2] He is described in the church chronicles as an incarnation of the evil spirit, and is said to have succeeded in suppressing Buddhism throughout the greater part of the land. The period from Srong Tsan Gampo down to the death of Lang Darma, who was murdered about A.D. 850, in a civil war, is called in the Buddhist books “the first introduction of religion.” It was followed by more than a century of civil disorder and wars, during which the exiled Buddhist monks attempted unsuccessfully again and again to return. Many are the stories of martyrs and confessors who are believed to have lived in these troublous times, and their efforts were at last crowned with success, for in the century commencing with the reign of Bilamgur in 971 there took place “the second introduction of religion” into Tibet, more especially under the guidance of the pandit Atīsha, who came to Tibet in 1041, and of his famous native pupil and follower Brom Ston. The long period of depression seems not to have been without a beneficial influence on the persecuted Buddhist church, for these teachers are reported to have placed the Tantra system more in the background, and to have adhered more strongly to the purer forms of the Mahāyāna development of the ancient faith.
For about three hundred years the Buddhist church of Tibet was left in peace, subjecting the country more and more completely to its control, and growing in power and in wealth. During this time it achieved its greatest The temporal sovereignty of the Lāmas. victory, and underwent the most important change in its character and organization. After the reintroduction of Buddhism into the “kingdom of snow,” the ancient dynasty never recovered its power. Its representatives continued for some time to claim the sovereignty; but the country was practically very much in the condition of Germany at about the same time—chieftains of almost independent power ruled from their castles on the hill-tops over the adjacent valleys, engaged in petty wars, and conducted plundering expeditions against the neighbouring tenants, whilst the great abbeys were places of refuge for the studious or religious, and their heads were the only rivals to the barons in social state, and in many respects the only protectors and friends of the people. Meanwhile Jenghiz Khān had founded the Mongol empire, and his grandson Kublai Khān became a convert to the Buddhism of the Tibetan Lāmas. He granted to the abbot of the Sākya monastery in southern Tibet the title of tributary sovereign of the country, head of the Buddhist church, and overlord over the numerous barons and abbots, and in return was officially crowned by the abbot as ruler over the extensive domain of the Mongol empire. Thus was the foundation laid at one and the same time of the temporal sovereignty of the Lāmas of Tibet, and of the suzerainty over Tibet of the emperors of China. One of the first acts of the “head of the church” was the printing of a carefully revised edition of the Tibetan Scriptures—an undertaking which occupied altogether nearly thirty years and was not completed till 1306.