Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1917 Excerpt:...monarch; but if he abandoned this world, as he would do, he would be a Buddha. Moreover the marks are described as being those of a Mahapurusa, or "Great Male"; and their abnormal character is clearly shown by the description given of some of them: thus the feet of the Buddha are covered, as we have seen, by wheels of great beauty, his hands have the fingers united by a membrane, between his eyebrows extends a circle of soft, white hair which emits marvellous rays of light, his spine is so rigid that he cannot turn his head, and so forth. In these features of the Buddha there is strong reason to see mythology, for the marks are those of the "universal monarch," the Cakravartin, as he is described freely in the Buddhist scriptures. The Mahdsudassana Sutta of the Digha Nikdya gives us a picture of such a king in the shape of Sakyamuni in an earlier birth as a Cakravartin. As he walks on the terrace of his palace, the divine wheel appears; and the king, after paying it due honour, bids it roll on and triumph. The wheel rolls to the east, followed by the king and his army, and the east yields to him; the wheel rolls then south, then west, then north, and all the lands submit and accept the Buddhist doctrine; after which it comes back to rest on the terrace of the palace with its sevenfold rampart of gems. It is difficult to doubt that the conception of the wheel owes its origin to sunworship, for as early as the Brdhmanas the wheel is freely used in the ritual to represent the solar luminary. This hypothesis receives increased force when it is remembered that the term Mahapurusa is applied in Brahmanical literature to Narayana, that form of Visnu which recalls the Purusa of the Rgveda and the Brdhmanas, the primeval being from which the worl...