No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Extract
In the well-known doctrine of the Three Bodies of the Buddha, the physical and earthly manifestation is called a nirmāṇa-kāya, “a body of artifice” or even more literally “a body of measurement”; a body made, then, as images and other works of art are made, by a “measuring out” (root mā). In the Divyâvadāna, ch. xxxvii, the word nimittam is similarly used of the Buddha's appearance which he himself emanates and projects for Rudrâyaṇa's painters, who cannot grasp his likeness unaided. It may be remarked that Indian imagery is always as much or more an iconometry (tālamāna) than an iconography; and that all this has an important bearing on the pragmatic equivalence, in Buddhist iconodule theory, of the verbal, carnal, and fictile manifestations by means of which the Buddha is presented to the world in a likeness. Our present object, however, is rather to point out what has not been generally recognized hitherto, that prototypes of the expressions nirmāṇa-kāya and nimittam occur already in the Brāhmaṇas and Saṁhitās.
- Type
- Miscellaneous Communications
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 1938
References
page 81 note 1 Eṣām krūram ātmanaḥ corresponds to Maitri Up., vi., 8, prajāpateḥ sthaviṣṭā tanūr yā, lokavatī, “Prajāpati's most concrete form, that which is cosmic.”
Caland translates “von unserem Körper”. It is, however, the Spirit, and not a “body”, that is the common property of the Devas: “Spirit is the whole property of a Deva” (ātmā sarvaṁ devasya, Nirukta, vii, 4). What the Devas transfer to the realm of measurement are the Spirit's possibilities of formal manifestation.
A confusion of the Spirit with the bodily self is described in Chāndogya Up., viii, 8, 5, as a “devilish doctrine”. “Body” and “field” are alternative expressions (idaṁ śarīraṁ . . . kṣetram) and the “field” is described as all that we nowadays mean by “body and soul” (Bhagavad-Gīta, xiii, 1 and 5, 6): with what bitter sarcasm Śankara then, commenting on ib., xiii, 2, remarks of such “learned” pandits as those who say “I am so and so” or “This is mine”, that “Their ‘learning’ consists in regarding the field itself as their Spirit” . . . idaṁ tat pāṇḍityaṁ, yat kṣetra eva ātmadar-ṣaṇam! Many a modern scholar's “learning” is of this sort.
page 82 note 1 It is in the same way that Indra's young mother (yuvatī) thinks him “unspeakable” (avadyam) and abandons him (parāsa), RV., iv, 18, 5–8, and that in v. 2, 5, Agni is pitied as a “mere mortal” (maryakam), cf. x, 72, 8, 9, where Aditi “casts away” the mortal Sun unto repeated birth and death.
page 82 note 2 With reference to Śiva. It is really the embodiment of Rudrâgni that is spoken of. The later assimilation of the Buddha to Śiva is by no means without good reasons.