________________ Did the Buddha Have Desires? 47 Dharmakirti agrees that this is the case. 21 Dharmakirti's courageous admission became the established opinion in the Buddhist epistemological tradition, but had probably little impact on the Buddhist tradition in general. As far as I know, his ideas were not taken up in any of the schools of Conservative Buddhism. In Mahayana Buddhism, on the other hand, the tension between compassion and passion was largely defused because the new Mahayana ontology considered the Buddha, in the sense of a certain individual person who preached the dharma in Northern India some centuries ago, to be an illusory apparition. Still, the notion of the Buddha's compassion remained problematic, albeit from a different angle; the problem has now become how compassion could be cultivated towards entities which, in the final analysis, do not exist. But that is another story, a story that I won't repeat here as it has already been skilfully told by Schmithausen on another occasion.22 21 Cf. ibid., p. 9.10-12: prayojanabhavad avyavahara iti cet, na, pararthatvat. na yukto vitaragatvad iti cet, na, karunayapi vrtteh. saiva raga iti cet. istam. 22 On this problem cf. Schmithausen, ibid. (as in n. 17).
