..续本文上一页 proud warriors and beautiful courtesans; he outdoes clever scholars in debates and rival ascetics in feats of supernormal powers; he teaches avaricious millionaires the wonders of generosity; he inspires diligence in heedless monks; he wins the reverence of kings and princes. As Buddhist devotees looked back on their deceased Master and pondered the question of what accounted for his extraordinary greatness, in no long time they realized that what was most outstanding about him was his boundless compassion. Not content with confining his compassionate concern for others to a single life, they saw it as spread out over innumerable lives in the chain of samsaric existence. Their creative imaginations thus gave birth to a vast treasury of stories about births, namely, about the Buddha”s previous births. These stories — the Jātakas or Birth Tales — told of how he had prepared himself for his mission as a Buddha by treading the path of a bodhisattva for unimaginable eons.

　　The keynote of the most memorable of these stories is service and self-sacrifice. It was by serving others and sacrificing himself for their good that the bodhisattva earned the merits and acquired the virtues that entitled him to attain Buddhahood. Thus, in Buddhist thought clear across the schools of Early Buddhism, the altruistic dimension of the Buddha”s enlightenment came to the forefront, literally carved in stone — in pillars and monuments stretching from India to Indonesia — and memorialized in stories and poetry. From this perspective, the Buddha”s enlightenment was significant, not merely because it opened the path to nirvāṇa for many others, but because it consummated an eons-long career that began with an altruistic motivation and endured across many eons sustained by an altruistic resolve. During this career, it was held, the bodhisattva qualified himself for Buddhahood by fulfilling certain supreme virtues, the pāramīs or pāramitās, which now took the place that the factors of the noble eightfold path held in Early Buddhism. This understanding of the Buddha, I must stress, was common to all the schools of Sectarian Buddhism, including the Theravāda.

　　During the age of Sectarian Buddhism, the Early Buddhist schools came to admit three "vehicles" to enlightenment: the vehicle of the disciple arahant, the śrāvaka-yāna, to be taken by the greatest number of disciples; the vehicle of the "solitary enlightened one" who attains realization without a teacher but does not teach, the pratyekabuddha-yāna, which is still more difficult; and the vehicle of the aspirant to Buddhahood, the bodhisattva-yāna. Once it became widespread in mainstream Indian Buddhism, the idea of the three vehicles was not only taken up by the Mahāyāna but was eventually also absorbed into conservative Theravāda Buddhism. Thus we read in the later Theravāda commentaries, such as those by Ācariya Dhammapāla and others, of the same three yānas or of the three kinds of bodhi: the enlightenment of disciples, of paccekabuddhas, and of sammā sambuddhas.[4]

　　VII. The emergence of the Mahāyāna as the bodhisattva-vehicle

　　Now at some point during this period, the altruistic interpretation of the Buddha”s enlightenment that culminated in the conception of the bodhisattva path flowed back upon the Buddhist community and, for some members at least, took on a prescriptive force. As they reflected deeply on what it meant to be an ideal follower of the Buddha, such Buddhist disciples concluded that to follow in the Buddha”s footsteps in the highest sense, it was no longer sufficient simply to follow the noble eightfold path aimed at the attainment of nirvāṇa. This was still seen as a valid option, an option that culminated in liberation for oneself and those one might immediately…

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