But there was at the same time another group of the disciples of the Buddha, whose religious and intellectual inclinations were not of the same type as their fellow-believers; and on that account a simple faith in the Buddha as present in his teachings did not quite satisfy them. They perhaps reasoned in this fashion: “If there were seven Buddhas before the advent of the Great Muni of Çakya and there would be one more who is to come, where, let us ask, did they derive their authority and knowledge to preach? How is it that there cannot be any more Buddhas, that they do not come to us much oftener? If they were human beings like ourselves, why not we ourselves be Buddhas?” These questions, when logically carried out, naturally led them to the theory of Dharmakâya, that all the past Buddhas, and those to come, and even we ordinary mortals made of clay and doomed to die soon, owe the raison d’être of their existence to the Dharmakâya, which alone is immortal in us {273} as well as in Buddhas. The first religious effort we have to make is, therefore, to recognise this archetype of all Buddhas and all beings. But the Dharmakâya as such is too abstract for the average mind to become the object of its religious consciousness; so they personified or rather materialised it. In other words, they idealised Çâkyamuni, endowed him not only with the physical signs (_lakṣas_) of greatness as in the Pâli scriptures, but with those of celestial transfiguration, and called him a Body of Bliss of the Tathâgata; while the historical human Buddha was called a Body of Transformation and all sentient beings Bodhisattvas, that is, beings of intelligence destined to become Buddhas. This idealised Buddha, or, what is the same thing, a personified Dharmakâya, according to the Mahâyâna Buddhists, not only revealed himself in the particular person of Siddhârtha Gautama in Central Asia a few thousand years ago, but is revealing himself in all times and all places. There is no specially favored spot on the earth where only the Buddha makes his appearance; from the zenith of Akaniṣta heaven down to the bottom of Nâraka, he is manifesting uninterruptedly and unintermittently and is working out his ideas, of which, however, our limited understanding is unable to have an adequate knowledge. The _Avatamsaka Sûtra_ (Buddhabhadra’s translation, fas. 45, chap. 34) describes how the Buddha works out his scheme of salvation in all possible ways. (See also the _Saddharma_ {274} _pundarîka_, Kern’s translation, chap. 2, p. 30 et seq., and also pp. 413-411.).