..续本文上一页eds Buddhas to discover and teach the path to liberation; it needs arahants to follow the path and confirm that the Dharma does indeed lead to liberation, adorning the teaching with examples of those who lead the purest holy life; it needs bodhisattvas to bring forth the resolve to perfect those qualities that will enable them at some point in the future, near or distant, to become Buddhas themselves and once again turn the unsurpassed Wheel of the Dharma.

　　Notes

　　1.There is also a third model of the Buddhist spiritual life, that of the paccekabuddha or pratyekabuddha. The paccekabuddha is similar in many respects to the disciple arahant, except that whereas the disciple arahant attains enlightenment under the guidance of a Buddha, the paccekabuddha gains enlightenment without any outside guidance. Otherwise, the combination of qualities that constitute this type is essentially the same. In the literature of the Buddhist systems, we often read of three types of enlightened ones — Pali: sāvakas, paccekabuddhas, and sammā sambuddhas (= Skt: śrāvakas, pratyekabuddhas, and samyak sambuddhas) — and of the three vehicles that lead to these attainments: the śrāvaka-yāna, the pratyekabuddha-yāna, and the bodhisattva-yāna.

　　2.There is at least one possible exception to this. MĀ 32, the Chinese Āgama parallel to MN 123, states at T I 469c24: "The Blessed One at the time of Kassapa Buddha made his initial vow for the Buddha path and practised the holy life," 世尊迦葉佛時, 始願佛道, 行梵行. (I am indebted to Bhikkhu Anālayo for this reference.) The idea suggested at MĀ 32 seems to me very improbable. For in MN 81 (with a parallel at MĀ 132), the potter Ghañikāra, a lay disciple of Kassapa Buddha and a non-returner, is a friend of the brahmin Jotipāla, the bodhisattva who is to become the Buddha Gotama. During the reign of Gotama Buddha, Ghañikāra appears as an arahant dwelling in one of the celestial Pure Abodes. The above statement would imply that in the time that Ghañikāra advanced from the non-returner state to arahantship, the bodhisattva had traversed the entire path to Buddhahood from the first generation of the aspiration to the final fruit of Buddhahood with all its extraordinary knowledges and powers.

　　3.Incidentally, in any Middle Indo-Aryan language, the word would be bodhisatta. This was Sanskritized as bodhisattva, "enlightenment being," and we take this meaning for granted; but the Sanskritized form might be wrong. For MIA bodhisatta could also represent Sanskrit bodhisakta, meaning "one intent on enlightenment," "one devoted to enlightenment," and this makes better sense than "an enlightenment being."

　　4.I do not think the expressions, "three yānas" or "three bodhis," are used in the commentaries that can be reliably ascribed to Buddhaghosa, though the idea is already implicit in the acknowledgement of three types of enlightened persons who reach their goals through the accumulation of pāramīs.

　　5.But see the symposium on Early Mahāyāna in The Eastern Buddhist, Vol. 35 (2003), especially Paul Harrison, "Mediums and Messages: Reflections on the Production of Mahāyāna Sūtras," pp. 115-151.

　　6.See Jan Nattier, A Few Good Men: The Bodhisattva Path according to The Inquiry of Ugra (Honolulu: University of Hawai”i Press, 2003), offers a translation of this sutra along with an extremely illuminating introduction. Of special relevance to the present paper are chapters 4, 7, and 8 of the introduction.

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