Eternal Buddha

Category: Buddha

From Buddhist Encyclopedia

The idea of an eternal Buddha is a notion popularly associated with the Mahayana scripture, the Lotus Sutra. The Lotus Sutra has the Buddha indicating that he became awakened countless, immeasurable, inconceivable myriads of trillions of aeons ("kalpas") ago and that his lifetime is "forever existing and immortal". From the human perspective, it seems as though the Buddha has always existed. The sutra itself, however, does not directly employ the phrase "eternal Buddha"; yet similar notions are found in other Mahayana scriptures, notably the Mahaparinirvana Sutra, which presents the Buddha as the ultimately real, eternal ("nitya"/ "śāśvata"), unchanging, blissful, pure Self (Atman) who, as the Dharmakaya, knows of no beginning or end. The All-Creating King Tantra additionally contains a panentheistic vision of Samantabhadra Buddha as the eternal, primordial Buddha, the Awakened Mind of bodhi, who declares: "From the primordial, I am the Buddhas of the three times [i.e. past, present and future]." The notion of an eternal Buddha perhaps finds resonance with the earlier idea of eternal Dharma/Nirvana, of which the Buddha is said to be an embodiment. The Buddha described Nirvana as neither existing, nor not-existing, so what does occur after a Buddha passes away is something known only to the Buddhas.

A Tang Dynasty sculpture of Amitabha Buddha, found in the Hidden Stream Temple Cave, Longmen Grottoes, China indicates.

Eternal Buddha - Self and Anatta

The notion of anatta (non-self) embodies the idea that there is no definite, fixed, unchanging entity constituting a "person" that passes from one life to the next; The common interpretation anatta also denies the existence of a fixed, unchanging, ever-enduring personal soul. The concept in place of the soul is 'bhava' ("becoming"), which is an ongoing flow of karmically projected energies that derive from, and give rise to, volitional thoughts and emotion.

Some expressions of Mahayana Buddhism, however, regard such teaching as incomplete, and offer in the Tathagatagarbha sutras the complementary and allegedly culminational doctrine of a pure Selfhood (the eternal yet ungraspable hypostasis of the Buddha) which no longer generates karma and which subsists eternally in the realm of Nirvana, from which sphere help to suffering worldly beings can be sent forth in the forms of various transitory physical Buddhas ("nirmānakāyas"). While the bodies of these corporeal Buddhas are subject to disease, decline and death - like all impermanent things - the salvational Tathagata or Dharmakaya behind them is forever free from impairment, impermanence and mortality. It is this transcendent yet immanent Dharmakaya-Buddha which is taught in certain major Mahayana sutras to be immutable and eternal and is intimately linked with Dharma itself. According to the Mahayana Mahaparinirvana Sutra, worldly beings fail to see this eternality of the Buddha and his Dharma. The Buddha comments in that latter Mahayana sutra, which presents itself as the last and most definitive of all sutras: "I say that those who do not know that the Tathagata [Buddha] is eternal are the foremost of the congenitally blind."

See also

• God in Buddhism
• Buddha - God or Man
• Trikaya
• Mahaparinirvana Sutra
• Angulimaliya Sutra
• Srimala Sutra
• Tathagatagarbha
• Tathagatagarbha Sutra

References

• The Threefold Lotus Sutra (Kosei Publishing, Tokyo 1975), tr. by B. Kato, Y. Tamura, and K. Miyasaka, revised by W. Soothill, W. Schiffer, and P. Del Campana
• The Mahayana Mahaparinirvana Sutra (Nirvana Publications, London, 1999-2000), tr. by K. Yamamoto, ed. and revised by Dr. Tony Page
• The Sovereign All-Creating Mind: The Motherly Buddha (Sri Satguru Publications, Delhi 1992), tr. by E.K. Neumaier-Dargyay