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Updated: May 1, 2025
It is true that in reading the Lotus we wonder how this marvellous cosmic vision can represent itself as the teaching of Gotama, but the Buddhacarita of Aśvaghosha, though embellished with literary mythology, hardly advances in doctrine beyond the Pali sutras describing the marvels of the Buddha's nativity and the greater part of Nâgârjuna's Friendly Epistle, which purports to contain an epitome of the faith, is in phraseology as well as thought perfectly in harmony with the Pali Canon.
His speculations have little to do with either Gotama or Amitâbha and he was thus not in living touch with either the old or new schools. His brother Vasubandhu had perhaps a greater position. He is reckoned as the twentieth Patriarch and Tibetan tradition connects him with the worship of Amitâbha.
The infant Jesus was visited by magi. The infant Buddha was visited by kings. Afterward, neither Jesus or Gotama wrote. But both preached charity, chastity, poverty, humility, and abnegation of self. Both fasted in a wilderness. Both were tempted by a devil. Both announced a second advent. Both were transfigured. Both died in the open air. At the death of each there was an earthquake.
Even in the monasteries the doctrine taught bore a closer resemblance to Hinduism than to the preaching of Gotama and it is this absence of the protestant spirit, this pliant adaptability to the ideas of each age, which caused Indian Buddhism to lose its individuality and separate existence.
In the Buddhist sphere it is clear that in the youth of Gotama Brahmanic doctrines and ritual were well known but not predominant. It is hardly demonstrable from literature, but still probable, that the ideas and usages which found expression in Jainism and Buddhism existed in the western districts, though less powerful there than in the east .
Two styles of biography are therefore possible: an account of what Gotama actually was and did and an account of what a Buddha is expected to be and do. This second style prevails in later Buddhist works: they contain descriptions of the deeds and teaching of a Buddha, adapted to such facts in Gotama's life as seemed suitable for such treatment or could not be ignored.
Then Duryodhana, seeing from a near point his army broken, alone resisted all the Parthas advancing furiously. Meanwhile the son of Hridika, riding upon another car, advanced to that spot. The mighty car-warrior Yudhishthira then quickly slew the four steeds of Kritavarma with four shafts, and pierced the son of Gotama with six broad-headed arrows of great force.
In matters of doctrine they regarded their own Abhidharma as the highest authority. They also held that Gotama had an ordinary human body and passed first into a preliminary form of Nirvana when he attained Buddhahood and secondly into complete Nirvana at his death. He was superhuman only in the sense that he had intuitive knowledge and no need to learn.
For sixty thousand years that sage underwent ascetic austerities in that asylum. One day, the Regent of the world, Yama, O tiger among men, repaired to that great sage of cleansed soul while he was engaged in the severest austerities. Yama beheld the great ascetic Gotama of rigid penances.
In Duryodhana's army then, O monarch, which had numbered many hundred thousands of warriors, not another great car-warrior was seen to be alive, save the heroic son of Drona, and Kritavarma, and Kripa the son of Gotama, O monarch, and that lord of the earth, thy son! Dhrishtadyumna, seeing me, laughingly addressed Satyaki, saying, 'What is the use of seizing this one?
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