________________
IV, 8, 18.
OF MILINDA THE KING.
133
is a difference as to the length of their individual lives', there is a difference as to their individual size In these four respects, O king, there is a difference between Bodisat and Bodisat. But there is no difference between any of the Buddhas, who are alike in bodily beauty3, in goodness of character, in power of contemplation and of reasoning, in emancipation, in the insight arising from the knowledge of emancipation, in
identical with the next one in the list, the length-of-life-difference' - which must be wrong.
It must be remembered that the Bodisats referred to throughout this dilemma are exclusively men—not those mentioned in the Gatakas (who are all Bodisats of the historical Buddha), but only those Bodisats who became Buddhas in the same life that is, the Buddhas themselves before they reached Buddhahood.
? Âyu-vemattata. This may be due to either of two causesin the first place they may be born as creatures whose allotted period of life varies. Thus the Bodisat was twenty times Sakka, the king of the gods; and his life would then have lasted hundreds of thousands of years. But he was 106 times an animal of some kind, and then his life would have been of course much shorter. Again, in his births as a man (more than 350 times, see the table in my Buddhist Birth Stories,' p.ci), the average duration of men's lives will have varied, according to Buddhist theory, from many centuries down to only a few years. It is in this second sense only that (with Hînati-kumbure) we must suppose the phrase & yuvemattatâ to be used—thus excluding all the Bodisats except such as were men. But in the Gataka stories the average age of man is (with one or two exceptions) normal.
i Pamâna-vemattatâ, which we must also understand to refer only to the varying average size of mankind, which, according to Buddhist theory, is very great at the commencement, and very small at the close, of a Kalpa. For it is only the men-Bodisats, and only in each series the last man-Bodisat (just before he became Buddha'), concerning whom this question of penance could arise.
& Rape, which the Simhalese repeats (p. 422), and which cannot here mean bodily form only.
Digitized by Google
