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THE WAY OF THE BODHISATTVA
who is on the point of consecration into Buddhahood (for example, Gautama was a Bodhisattva prior to his awakening under the Bo Tiee), in the Mahāyāna tradition the term designates those sublimely indifferent, compassionate beings who remain at the threshold of nirvaṇa for the comfort and salvation of the world. Out of perfect indifference (egolessness) and perfect compassion (which is also egolessness) the Mahāyāna Bodhisattva does not experience the "real or true enlightenment” (samyaksambodhi) of the Buddha and then pass to final extinction (parinirvāņa), but stops at the brink-the brink of time and eternity-and thus transcends that pair of opposites: for the world will never end; the round of the cosmic eons will go on and on without ceasing; the vow of the Bodhisattva, to remain at the brink till all shall go in before him, amounts to a vow to remain as he is forever. And this is the reason why his vow is world-redemptive. Through it the truth is symbolized that time and eternity, saṁsāra and nirvāņa, do not exist as pairs of opposites but are equally "emptiness” (śūnyatā), the void.
In popular worship the Bodhisattva is invoked because he is possessed of an inexhaustible power to save. His potential perfection is being diffused all the time, in an everlasting act of universal salvage, and he appears in helpful forms-for example as the legendary flying horse-of-rescue, Cloud "--to deliver creatures from the darkness of their woeful lives-in-ignorance. He is possessed of a boundless "treasury of virtues" (guṇa sambhāra), which was accumulated by means of a prolonged and absolutely faultless practice, through many lifetimes, of the "highest rectitude" (pāramitā). During eons, the Bodhisattva-in-the-making progressed along a sublime path of the most especial, most highly refined psychological austerities, cancelling always every notion and emotion of ego. And this is what brought him into possession of that inexhaustible "treasury," which, in the end, as a result of his supreme act of timeless renunciation, became
88 Cf. supra, pp. 392-393.
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