Page:The Development of Mahayana Buddhism - The Monist 1914.pdf/10

574 very well become the object of our religious consciousness. But there is the awakening of the will in suchness, and with this awakening we have conditional and self-limiting suchness in place of the absolute unknowable. As to the reason and manner of this process the human mind has to confess a profound and eternal ignorance. It is in this transformation of suchness that the Mahâyâna system perceives the religious significance of dharmakâya.

The dharmakâya is now conceived by the human heart as love and wisdom, and its eternal prayer is heard to be the deliverance of the ignorant from their self-created evil karma which haunts them as an eternal curse. The process of deliverance is to awaken in the mind of the ignorant the samyaksambodhi, the most perfect wisdom, which is a reflection in sentient beings of the dharmakâya. This wisdom, this bodhi, is generally found asleep in the benighted, because a sort of spiritual slumber results from the narcotic influence of the evil karma, which has been and is being committed through the non-realization of the presence of the dharmakâya. Deliverance or enlightenment consists, therefore, in making every sentient being open his spiritual eye to this fact. It is not his ego-soul that makes him think, feel, desire, or aspire, but the dharmakâya itself in the form of bodhichitta or wisdom heart which constitutes his ethical and religious being. If we abandon the thought of egoism and return to the universal source of love and wisdom, we are released from the bond of evil karma, and we are enlightened as to the reason of existence; in short, we are Buddhas.

In trying to make a sentient being realize the presence in himself of the bodhichitta, the dharmakâya can be said to be working for its own sake, that is, to awake from the spell of ignorance. Here is involved a great philosophical and religious problem. In the beginning, the dharmakâya