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Religion brings no gloom into this sunshine: before the Buddhas and the gods folk smile as they pray; the temple-courts are playgrounds for the children; and within the enclosure of the great public shrines which are places of festivity rather than of solemnity dancing-platforms are erected.
Śântideva's Bodhisattva, when conceiving the thought of Bodhi or eventual supreme enlightenment to be obtained, it may be, only after numberless births, feels first a sympathetic joy in the good actions of all living beings. He addresses to the Buddhas a prayer which is not a mere act of commemoration, but a request to preach the law and to defer their entrance into Nirvana.
All things having form or name, Buddhas, gods, men, and all living creatures, suns, worlds, moons, the whole visible cosmos, are transitory phenomena.... Assuming, with Herbert Spencer, that the test of reality is permanence, one can scarcely question this position; it differs little from the statement with which the closing chapter of the First Principles concludes:
The dead hidden away there have long since become one with the earth around them; and these thousands of little gray stones, these multitudes of ancient little Buddhas, eaten away by lichens, seem to be now no more than a proof of a series of existences, long anterior to our own, and lost forever and altogether in the mysterious depths of ages.
The wiser ones go to work in a speculative spirit, aiming secretly at this perhaps, but quite willing to go on with that, if Providence so wills it. Buddhas are good subjects; there is a certain genial rotundity not difficult to attain, and the pyramidal build of the idol is well suited to the material.
Stepping down he alighted on the spot where all the Buddhas return, countless hosts of angels accompanied him, conveying with them their palace abodes as a gift. The people of Gambudvipa, with closed hands, looking up with reverence, beheld him. Escaping the Drunken Elephant and Devadatta
Here also is the place where the four Buddhas walked and sat, and at which a tope was built that is still existing. Sha-che should probably be Sha-khe, making Cunningham's identification of the name with the present Saket still more likely.
Inside were enshrined three gentle Buddhas of old creamy ivory, perfectly carved to the minutest petal of the full-blown lotus upon which each reposed. "Indeed, it is the end of the year. We must sell all things cheaply," answered the merchant. "It is asked sixty yen for true ancient artistic object."
The myriad-tongued ceremonial of the Brahmans of twenty-five centuries ago was the old evasion of righteousness in human life. Gautama saw this, and his noble soul rebelled against a faith which proclaimed that salvation was a thing of outward religious forms and not of the heart within. "To cease from all sin, To get virtue, To cleanse our own heart, This is the religion of the Buddhas."
'Tis said that Chowmushih slept in a boat so that his dreams might mingle with those of the lotus. It was the same spirit which moved the Empress Komio, one of our most renowned Nara sovereigns, as she sang: "If I pluck thee, my hand will defile thee, O flower! Standing in the meadows as thou art, I offer thee to the Buddhas of the past, of the present, of the future."
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