[26] That is,
first, five pre-penultimate Buddhas; then their Bodhisattvas or
penultimate Buddhas; and then the ultimate or human Buddhas, of which
Gautama was one. Or, first abstraction; then pre-human effluence; then
emanation.
All this multiplication of beings is unknown to Southern Buddhism,
unknown to the Saddharma Pundarika, and very probably unknown also to
the Chinese pilgrims who visited India in the fifth and seventh
centuries. Professor Rhys Davids, in his compact little manual of
Buddhism, says:[27]
"Among those hypothetical beings--the creations of a sickly
scholasticism, hollow abstractions without life or reality--the
fourth Amitabha, 'Immeasurable Light,' whose Bodhisatwa is
Avalokitesvara, and whose emanation is Gautama, occupies of
course the highest and most important rank. Surrounded by
innumerable Bodhisatwas, he sits enthroned under a Bo-tree in
Sukhavati, i.e., the Blissful, a paradise of heavenly joys,
whose description occupies whole tedious books of the so-called
Great Vehicle. By this theory, each of the five Buddhas has
become three, and the fourth of these five sets of three is the
second Buddhist Trinity, the belief in which must have arisen
after the seventh century of our era.
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