Page:The Development of Mahayana Buddhism - The Monist 1914.pdf/12

576 two notions, karma and parinâmanâ. I will try to make this clear.

First, what does parinâmanâ mean? It means “to bend,” “to turn about,” or “to deliver,”, or “to transfer,” or “to renounce,” for which the early Chinese Buddhists have hui hsiang, which means “to revolve and be directed towards,” that is to say, “to turn a thing about and hand it over to another.” The doctrine of parinâmanâ, then, is to turn one’s merits over to another, to renounce oneself for others, to sacrifice oneself for the sake of others, to atone for others' evil karma by ones own good deeds, to substitute oneself for another who according to the law of karma ought to suffer himself. Or, to use Christian terminology, the doctrine of parinâmanâ is in its principle that of vicarious sacrifice; with this difference, however, that while in Christianity vicarious sacrifice means the death of Christ on the cross for the sins of all mankind, the Mahâyâna philosophy does not confine the principle of vicarious sacrifice to a solitary historical incident. Christianity is built upon the history of a person, whatever its intrinsic authenticity may be, and not directly upon the facts of our religious consciousness and intellectual necessity. Therefore, it is unable to uphold the universal application of the principle of vicarious sacrifice, not to say its inability to appreciate the importance of the principle of karma. This is where Christianity derives its strength, the strength of concreteness and objectivity, as compared to Mahâyâna Buddhism; but here lies also its weakness, at least so it would seem to Buddhist thinkers.

The notion of parinâmanâ is based upon the following truths: The universe, according to the Mahâyâna, is a grand spiritual system composed of moral beings, who are so many fragmentary reflexes of the dharmakâya. The system is so closely knitted together that when any part of it or any unit composing it is affected in one way