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HINAYANA AND MAHĀYANA
some other injury." The father orders his son brought to him, but, before revealing his birth to him, employs him for some years at all kinds of work, first at the meanest kinds, and then at the most important. The father treats his son with paternal kindness, but the son, although he manages all his father's property, lives in a thatched cottage and believes himself to be poor. At last, when his education is completed, he learns the truth.
In the same way we are the sons of the Buddha, and the Buddha says to us today, “You are my sons." But, like the poor man, we liad no idea of our dignity, no idea of our mission as future Buddhas. Thus the Buddha has made us reflect on inferior doctrines. We have applied ourselves to them, secking as payment for our day's work only nirvāṇa, and finding that it is already ours. Meanwhile the Buddha has made us dispensers of the knowledge of the Buddhas, and we have preached it without desiring it for ourselves. At last, however, the Buddha has revealed to us that this knowledge is ours, and that we are Buddhas, like him
self.55
This is the doctrine that has becn termed, somewhat complacently, “The Big Ferryboat" (mahāyāna), the ferry in which all may ride, in contrast to “The Little Ferryboat" (hinayāna), the way of those lonely oncs, “lights unto themselves," who steer the difficult strait of individual release. The Big Ferryboat, with its pantheons of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, prayer-wheels, incense, gongs, and graven images, rosaries and muttered syllables, has been disparaged generally by modern Occidental critics as a vulgar popularization of the Buddha's doctrine furthered by the advent into the northwestern provinces of barbaric peoples (not the Greeks, of course, but the sakas and Yueh-chi), and yet, if anything is clear it is that the entire meaning of the paradox implicit in the very idea of Buddhahood has here come to manisestation. Nāgārjuna (c. 200 A.D.), the founder of the Mādhya
60 Saddharmapundarika ("The Lotus of the True Law") 4. (Sacred Books of the East, Vol. XXI, pp. 98ff.).
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