________________
THE WAY OF THE BODHISATTVA
but meanwhile he cannot presume to argue with his guru in callow criticism of the paradoxical doctrinc. lle must undergo, first, a transformation; that, not criticism, will be the means of his understanding. He must be brought by a process of evolution to a spiritual level from which to experience the meaning of the enigmatical teaching. And meanwhile, the process of his sublimation will be facilitated by meditation on the magic formula, which is the "Heart of the Wisdom of the Other Shore," and which he is to regard as an expression of his own supreme belief, designed to concentrate and intensify his faith. Though temporarily unintelligible to him, it is nevertheless liis crcdo, to be repeated in constant recitation, as an invocation bidding the Wisdom of the Other Shore to come to him. And the wonder is that this magic formula actually can function as an effective alchemical charm, facilitating the transmutation that duly yields, of itself, the gold of enlightenment.
For meditation on this curious string of words is not the sole means by which the ncophyte, filled with faith, is to attempt to bring to pass the all-iniportant transformation in his understanding. The persorinance of certain characteristic acts is also required, and these, together with the experience of their results, make the formula more meaningful in the course of time, while, in reciprocal effect, the formula, constantly held in mind, serves to extract and bring to a point the lesson of the faithful performance of the necessary acts.
The sense, for example, of the Mahāyānist rerenderings of certain tales from the Jālaka, in the sixth-century collection known as the Jätakamālā, “The Garland of Tales from the Earlier Lives of the Buddha," 01 is that one has to assume pecu
91 The Jätakamäla is a work in Sanskrit attributed to a certain Äryasūra (for translation, see supra, p. 537. note 84), which contains 34 Jätakas, or exemplary tales of the earlier lives of the Buddha, adapted, for the most part, from the much earlier, Pali compendium of more than five hundred Tátakas. The latter is one of the great portions of the orthodox Hinayāna
543
