Philosophies of India

SR No.: 007309
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell
Publisher: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd
Publication Year: 1953
Total Pages: 709
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 34 MB

Page 577

BUDDHISM
old age, and death. It is still the benighting affliction of those who live in desire and fear, in hope, despair, disgust, and sorrow. But the one whose mind is cleanserl, whose "soul," whose selfhood, has become annihilate in the void, is conscious of an enjoyable wonder, like a dream, or like a display set up by magic, with which, as the void, he is identical. The beings who, in their ignorance, experience themselves as engulfed in a sea of pain are themselves non-beings, void and unchanging; only their ignorance makes them feel that they are in pain. Mingled with the compassion of the Bodhisattva is a quality, therefore, of "great delight" (mahā-sukha); for where others behold pain, disaster, change, poverty, vice, or, on the other hand, honor, pleasure, attainment, luxury, or virtue, the "higliest knowledge" (prajña) reveals the void: namcless, absolute, unchanging, stainless, without beginning or end, like the sky. Hence the Bodhisattva wanders everywhere, boundless, fearless, like a lion, roaring the lion-roar of Bodhisattvahood. These three worlds have been created, as it were, for-by-and of-the enjoyment of this immortal: they are his lilā, his "play."
Since the candidate for such knowledge must behave like one who has already attained, a programmatic, sacramental breaking of the bounds that normally stand as the limits of virtue was carefully undertaken in certain schools of the Mahāyāna. “By those identical actions by which mortals rot in hell for hundreds of crores of cycles, the yogi" we read in one of the celebrated texts, "is liberated.” 99 In spite of all the scandal that has been spread concerning this phase of Buddhist worship, the majority of the sacramental breaches (in a socicty hedged on cvery side by the most meticulous taboos) were not such as would give
99 Jñanasiddhi 1. (In Two Vajrayana Works, edited with an introduction by Benoytosh Bhattacharyya, Gaekwad's Oriental Series, No. XLIV, Baroda, 1929, p. xix.) A crore is ten million.
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