Page Text
________________
BUDDHAHOOD special branch of Buddhist writings, in which an attempt is made actually to state something of the supreme experience.
One may well marvel at the bold experiment-an effort to represent the ultimate essence of an incommunicable intuition through words and conceptions familiar to the usual philosophical and pious understanding. But, wonderful to relate, a vivid sense of the ineffable reality known in “extinction" (nirvāna) is actually conveyed in this unexampled body of strange, esoteric texts. They are named Prajñā pāramitā: “The Accomplishment of Transcendental Wisdom,” or “The Wisdom (prajñā) Gone to the Other Shore (pāran-itā).” And they are a scries of the most curious dialogues, conducted in a sort of conversation-circle of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas-mostly legendary beings, superhuman saviors, without a single merely human, sull half-bewildered aspirant-to-enlightenment among them.
The Illumined Ones behave in a way that should be rather shocking and confusing to any sound thinker, who, from habit and firm determination, is resolved to keep his feet on the ground. In a sort of mocking conversation, these Buddhas and Bodhisattvas entertain themselves with cniginatic al statements of the unstatable truth. They delight in declaring, time and again, that there is no such thing as Buddhism, no such thing as Enlightenment, nothing remotely resembling the extinction of nirvāṇa, setting traps for each other and trying to trick each other into assertions that might imply-even remotely-the reality of such conceptions. Then, most artfully, they always elude the cleverly placed hazards and hidden pitfalls-and all engage in a glorious, transolympian laugh; for the merest hint of a notion of nirvāṇa would have betrayed a trace of the vestige of the opposite attitude, saṁsāra, and the clinging to individual existence.
For example, in one of the texts the Buddha makes the following declaration to his pupil Subhūti. "Whosoever stands in the ferryboat of the saviors-who-lead-to-the-far-bank shall bear
483
| SR No. | 007309 |
| Book Title | Philosophies of India |
| 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 |