Three Bodies Doctrine
The profusion of buddhas, including those like Bhaisajya-guru (the Buddha of Healing) and Mahavairocana, made some kind of systematization necessary. What emerged (ca. 2d or 3d century C.E.) was the “three bodies” (tri-kaya) theory, which describes the Buddha as having three bodies: the body of manifestation (nirmana-kdya), the reward body (sambhoga-kaya), and the absolute, or Law, body (dharma-kaya).
The Law body is the Buddha as Truth itself, the fundamental buddha beyond shape or form, purely abstract. The Law body is the source of other bodies; it takes form in the manifestation and reward bodies. Mahavairocana is the Law body. Followers of the Japanese Shingon sect, though they recognize many different buddhas, understand Mahavairocana to be the supreme existence and venerate this buddha.
The body of manifestation, also called the transformation body, is the Buddha in human form. Pre-Mahayana Buddhism does not accept that Sakyamuni was anything but human, only that his abilities were vasdy superior to those of an ordinary person. In Mahayana Buddhism however, Sakyamuni, the Buddha as Truth, is believed to have manifested himself in human form, and as such is termed “body of manifestation.”
A good example of the reward body is Amitabha. Unlike Sakyamuni, this buddha is not a historical person, but a manifestation of the Law body. Amitabha appears in only some sutras, and made a number of vows to save living beings (including one that promised salvation to any person who called his name). He practiced as a bodhisattva in life after life until he eventually attained buddhahood. Such a buddha is called a “reward body” because his body results from eons of religious practice. Those unable to gain enlightenment through their own efforts call upon Amitabha with all their might. Another example of the reward body is Bhaisajya-guru, the Buddha of Healing, who also made vows and has his own pure land. His statues are distinguished by the fact that they carry a medicine pot (perhaps originally the mani gem) in the left hand.
Bodhisattvas are beings undergoing religious training to attain buddhahood not only for themselves but also for other people; it is hard to say whether we should call them human beings or gods. Before becoming a buddha, Sakyamuni spent many existences as a bodhisattva, sometimes as a prince, sometimes as an elephant or a deer, but at all times manifesting his spirit of sacrifice and compassion. He trained in this way for three asamkhya kalpas. Many J a. takas relate the stories of his former lives.
Avalokitesvara. One of the most famous bodhisattvas is Avalokitesvara (Kuan-yin in Chinese; Kannon in Japanese). There are many theories about the meaning of this name. It was translated into Chinese using characters meaning “sound observer,” that is, one who listens to sounds, or more specifically, to the cries of the suffering in the world. A second translation, Kuan-tzu-tsai, means “one who sees everything without hindrance.” In the Heart Sutra (Prajnaparamita-hrdaya-sutra, ca. 5 th 6th century C.E.), Avalokitesvara looks down on the world from on high, equipped with many powers and abilities.
The bodhisattva Avalokitesvara appears not only in the Pure Land sutras but also in the famous Lotus Sutra (Saddharma-pundarika-sutra, ca. 1st century C.E.). He is popular throughout Buddhist Asia and is strongly associated with the geographical spread of Mahayana Buddhism. The sculptures in Cave 90 at Kanheri, north of Bombay, depict Avalokitesvara protecting devotees from shipwreck and wild beasts. The Chinese priest Fa-hsien (340?-420? C.E.) himself was shipwrecked twice on his return journey to China and called on Avalokitesvara for deliverance from danger. Avalokitesvara also came to be thought of as having his own Pure Land, called Potalaka. Local versions of this name are to be found in many places in China, Korea, and Japan. For example, Mount Futara (also called Nikko) in Tochigi Prefecture, Japan, is a form of Potalaka, and in Lhasa, Tibet, the palace of the Dalai Lama is called Potala.
Statues of this bodhisattva are of many kinds. The usual form, the Holy Avalokitesvara, is human in appearance. Another form is the Eleven-headed Avalokitesvara, with ten small heads like a crown on top of an ordinary head, perhaps representing the various characteristics of the bodhisattva or symbolizing the bodhisattva’s ability to see all those who are suffering in the world below. The Unfailing Fishing Line Avalokitesvara carries a rope (pasa) looped in his hand; this he casts to capture those who are evil and to pull in those who are suffering. In this he is unfailing (amoghd). The Thousand-armed form expresses the idea that Avalokitesvara saves numerous suffering beings. Paintings excavated in Central Asia show one thousand arms, as does a wooden statue at Toshodai-ji in Nara. Due to the difficulty of carving, statues having forty arms are more common, each arm being said to represent twenty-five abilities. The Thousand-eyed form is a similar concept and symbolizes the bodhisattva’s encompassing power of salvation; the eyes are depicted on the palms of the hands. The Horse-headed Avalokitesvara appears in sculpture as a human body and head with a horse’s head on top. The origin and meaning of this form is not clear.
All these depictions are male, but female depictions also exist, such as the Kuan-yin called the wife of Ma-lang and the Cundi Avalokitesvara. Ma-lang was a man whom Kuan-yin wanted to bring to the Buddhist faith. The bodhisattva therefore took the form of a woman, promising Ma-lang that she would marry him if he became a Buddhist. Because Avalokitesvara expresses compassion, there was a strong tendency to link the image of the bodhisattva with that of a woman rather than a man. Moreover, in the Near East there existed a religion of the mother goddess, and Buddhists wanted a deity with the same characteristics. The Indic word Avalokitesvara is a masculine noun, however, and people in India and Central Asia felt a certain reluctance to depict him in female form in sculpture; indeed, Avalokitesvara always wears a mustache in that part of the world.
In China and Japan there is no grammatical gender, so people did not feel the same resistance to portraying the bodhisattva as female. Gradually the feminine form grew more and more prevalent. In Japan, most people think of Kannon as being a woman, and yearn for her loving warmth. A work by the nineteenth-century Japanese painter Kano Hogai, entided Compassionate Mother Kannon, shows Kannon appearing above the clouds holding a staff in one hand, from the end of which dangles a thread. On the tip of this thread is a balloon-like object containing a baby. As the title indicates, the painting can be interpreted as a depiction of womanhood, and Kannon does have a woman’s form. Nevertheless if we look closely at the face we can see a mustache, which recalls the Indian and Central Asian traditions.
Maitreya. Second only to Avalokitesvara in popularity is Maitreya, whose name derives from maitri, meaning “benevolence.” His cult grew at about the same time as that of Avalokitesvara and perhaps even predates it. He is the Future Buddha, who now resides in the Tusita heaven. Later there arose the belief that it was relatively easy to reach the Tusita heaven and that even an ordinary person might hope to achieve the religious training necessary to go there. This supported the cult of those who sought rebirth in that heaven. Between the third and seventh centuries the cult was extremely popular in eastern Asia. Early in the fifth century, the Chinese priest Fa-hsien crossed the Pamirs on the way from China to India. Deep in the Karakoram Range he came across a large wooden statue of Maitreya. The local people told him that Buddhism had begun spreading outside India when the statue was erected. After Sakyamuni’s death it was therefore Maitreya who had the ability to spread Buddhist teachings. The Maitreya faith subse-quendy gained great popularity in China, and spread from there to the Korean Peninsula and Japan. Among the statues in the Horyu-ji Treasure House at the Tokyo National Museum, there are many figures of Miroku (Maitreya), depicted sitting with one leg resting on the other knee and the right hand raised, touching the chin. Around the eighth century, the Maitreya cult’s popularity waned, perhaps because of the rise of the Avalokitesvara cult. Bodhisattvas and Pure Land thought. Also competing with the Maitreya cult was that of Amitabha Buddha (Amida in Japanese). His statues are often shown accompanied by two attendants, Avalokitesvara and Mahasthamaprapta. With the rise of Pure Land thought, people began to ask which cult, that of Amitabha or Maitreya, was the most effective for salvation, and to wonder if it would be better to be reborn in the Pure Land of Sukhavati or in the Tusita heaven. It was, in fact, a straightforward decision: whereas the Tusita heaven was merely one of many abodes in the realm of desire, with its lord not a buddha but a bodhisattva, the Pure Land of Sukhavati was a buddha-land where the defilements no longer existed, and its lord was a buddha. No doubt proponents of the Pure Land cult would have stressed that a place like the Tusita heaven was neither one thing nor the other; rebirth there did not preclude falling at some later time into the lower realms. In eastern Asia, the Maitreya cult gradually weakened, while that of Amitabha grew ever more popular.
Other bodhisattvas. Manjusri, the bodhisattva of wisdom, is depicted riding on a lion. Samantabhadra symbolizes Buddhist meditation and is shown riding an elephant. Though Brahma and Indra appear in early pre-Mahayana Buddhist carvings, Manjusri and Samantabhadra belong only to the later Mahayana tradition. Ksitigarbha is determined to deliver all the beings of the world from their suffering. Like Amitabha Buddha, he has undergone eons of religious training, but Ksitigarbha has appeared in this world without accepting buddhahood. He is usually depicted as a bodhisattva with a shaved head. Other bodhisattvas portrayed frequendy in Buddhist art include Suryaprabha (“sunlight”) and Candraprabha (“moonlight”), the attendants of Bhaisajya-guru; and Mahasthamaprapta, who symbolizes wisdom and is one of the attendants of Amitabha.
Because bodhisattvas are still undergoing religious training, living beings of this world may be called bodhisattvas. Asanga and Vasubandhu, great Buddhist philosophers of the fifth century, have been given the title of bodhisattva, as have Gyogi (668-749) and Nichiren (1222-82) in Japan.
Avatars. The idea of the temporary transformation (gouge or gongen in Japanese) of buddhas and bodhisattvas is a distinctive feature of Buddhism. For example, the universal Buddha Mahavairocana manifests himself in the form of Sakyamuni or Maitreya, and Avalokitesvara may appear in the eleven-headed form or in the form of Ma-lang’s wife, adopting whichever manifestation best suits the circumstances.
This idea appeared in Buddhism after the rise of Mahayana; it derives from the Hindu concept of avatars, or incarnations. Visnu, one of Hinduism’s chief deities, has ten incarnations, including a boar, a lion, and the Buddha. Because followers of Hinduism consider Sakyamuni to be an avatar of Visnu, they tend to view Buddhism as part of their own religion. The idea of avatars has been extremely effective in the spread of Buddhism from region to region, allowing Buddhism to absorb the gods of other countries as temporary manifestations of its own deities. The Japanese kami (nature gods and deified heroes) were thus declared to be avatars of particular Indian deities. For example, Hachiman, said to be the deified emperor Ojin, was identified as a great bodhisattva, a Buddhist avatar.
