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Updated: June 17, 2025
So difficult is it also to hear the excellent doctrine of all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. In all the myriads of Kalpas such a way comes seldom. Difficult is it for men to find a wise Teacher; so is it also for them to be instructed and to hear the Holy Law. More difficult still is it to receive the True Faith.
It were tedious to recount all the steps in the further development of Northern Buddhism. That is, first, five pre-penultimate Buddhas; then their Bodhisattvas or penultimate Buddhas; and then the ultimate or human Buddhas, of which Gautama was one. Or, first abstraction; then pre-human effluence; then emanation.
All evil spirits in heaven and earth tremble before that believer who standeth upon the Immutable promise. For even in this world hath he the mind of Divine Illumination. Kwannon and Seishi, the Bodhisattvas of incarnate Pity and Wisdom, together with their companions, innumerable as the sands of Ganges, shall be beside him who reciteth the Holy Name, even as the shadow cleaves to the substance.
The priests are gone; the great bell is gone; the Buddhas and the Bodhisattvas have vanished, all save one a broken-handed Jizo of stone, smiling with eyelids closed, under the moon. In the centre of the court is a framework of bamboo supporting a great drum; and about it benches have been arranged, benches from the schoolhouse, on which villagers are resting.
Arhats and Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, and the shapes of a mythology older than they, filled all the shadowy space; not ranked by hierarchies, as in a temple, but mingled without order, as in a silent panic.
*"The Buddhists recognized that the Shinto gods were incarnations of some of the many Buddhas and Bodhisattvas brought from India and China, and then the two faiths amalgamated and for centuries comfortably shared the same places of worship." Every-Day Japan, by Lloyd.
Its ideas and precepts are Hinayanist: the Arhat is held up as the ideal and in a remarkable passage where the degrees of sanctity are graded and compared no mention is made of Bodhisattvas. This first translation was followed by a long series of others, principally from the Sûtra-Piṭaka, for very little of the Vinaya was translated before the fifth century.
It is certainly very curious, and in a sense amusing, to find flourishing in far-off Japan the old gods of India, that one would suppose to have been utterly dead and left behind in oblivion. As acknowledged devas or kings and bodhisattvas or soon-to-be Buddhas, not a few once defunct Hindu gods, utterly unknown to early Buddhism, have forced their way into the company of the elect.
All are not found in all sects and some are shared with the Hinayana but probably none are found fully developed outside the Mahayana. Many of them have parallels in the contemporary phases of Hinduism. A belief in Bodhisattvas and in the power of human beings to become Bodhisattvas.
For the sake of all dwelling in the Ten Regions hath He kept the fullness of all the Teachings, in His divine and mighty promises. He who is Infinite never resteth, for together with the Bodhisattvas of Compassion and Pure Reason He laboureth, that the souls of them that duly receive Him may have salvation, enlightening them with the light of His mercy.
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