“At this time the Bhagavat in the Double Tower of Chandana seated himself in the assigned seat, entered upon a samâdhi, and displayed a marvelous phenomenon. There appeared innumerable lotus-flowers with thousand-fold petals and each flower as large as a carriage-wheel. They had perfectly beautiful color and fragrant odour, but their petals containing celestial beings in them were not yet unfolded. They all were raised now by themselves high up in the heavens and hung over the earth like a canopy of pearls. Each one of these lotus-flowers emitted innumerable rays of light and simultaneously grew in size with wonderful vitality. But through the divine power of Buddha they all of {245} a sudden changed color and withered. All the celestial Buddhas sitting cross-legged within the flowers now came into full view, shone with innumerable hundred thousand-fold rays of light. At this moment the transcendent glory of the spot was beyond description.”... As is here thus clearly shown, the Buddha in the Mahâyâna scriptures is not an ordinary human being walking in a sensuous world; he is altogether dissimilar to that son of Suddhodana, who resigned the royal life, wandered in the wilderness, and after six years’ profound meditation and penance discovered the Fourfold Noble Truth and the Twelve Chains of Dependence; and we cannot but think that the Mahâyâna Buddha is the fictitious creation of an intensely poetic mind. Let it be so. But the question which engages us now is, “How did the Buddhists come to relegate the human Buddha to oblivion, as it were, and assign a mysterious being in his place invested with all possible or sometimes impossible majesty and supernaturality?” This question, which marks the rise of Mahâyâna Buddhism, brings us to the doctrine of Trikâya,--which in a sense corresponds to the Christian theory of trinity. According to this doctrine, the Buddhists presume a triple existence of the Tathâgata, that is, the Tathâgata is conceived by them as manifesting himself in three different forms of existence: the Body of Transformation, the Body of Bliss, and the Body of Dharma. Though they are conceived as three, they are in fact all the manifestations of one Dharmakâya,--the Dharmakâya that revealed itself in the historical Çâkyamuni {246} Buddha as a Body of Transformation, and in the Mahâyâna Buddha as a Body of Bliss. However differently they may appear from the human point of view, they are nothing but the expression of one eternal truth, in which all things have their _raison d’être_. _An Historical View._