Lalit Vistara

Author(s): Rajendralala Mitra
Publisher: Asiatic Society

Page 52

50
LALITA VISTARA.
midst of a forest, practising their religious exercises; those five bun. dred Pratycka Buddhas, baring hoard this cry, immediately rose up into the air and went together to Bonares; having arrived there, they began to exhibit their supernatural powers ; causing their bodies to asceud into space, and einit all sorts of brilliant appearancus; and then baviny uttered a Gáthá, one after another, they ended their ternu of days and entered Nirvana. Beal's Romantic History of Buddha, pp. 25, 26.
19. Wrigadáva, (p. 30). The place is of course the Saranátha of the present day. The word Sáranátha, means " lord of antelopes," from sárd "an antelope" and nuthu "a lord" or "master," and typifies the affection which Buildha always evinced for thoso animals.
13. Time, (p. 37). The Burmese version makes the Nats alias Devaputras ask the Bodhisattva direct for the reasons which induced him to reflect on the suur important subjects, and his replies are more amplified than in the Sanskrit. Thus as regards time, he is made to say
"Phralaong observed that the apparition of Buddha could not bare taken placo during the previous periods of 100,000 years and more that lud just elapsed, because during that period the life of men was on the increasc. The instructions on birth and death, as well as on the iniseries of life, which form the true characteristics of Buddha's law, would not then be received with guificient interost and attention. Had any atteinpt been made at that time to proach on these three great topics, the men of those days to whom those great events would have appeared so distant, could not have been induced to look upon them with sufficient attention; the four great truths would have made no impression on their minds; vain and fruitless would bave been the efforts to disentangle them from the ties of passions then encompassing all beings, and to make them sigh after : the deliverance froin the miseries entailed upon mankind by birth, life, and death. The period when human life is under a hundred years' duration cannot at all be the proper period for such an important event, the passions of men are then so znany and so deeply rooted, that Buddha would in vain attempt to preach his law. As the characters which a man traces over the smooth surface of unrulled water instantly disappear without leaving any mark behind,