Page:The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927).djvu/104

54 renounce the world, he will become a Tāthagata, Arhant, a perfectly enlightened Buddha.”’

Again, the Jātaka,—of the Southern School,—a compilation of folk-lore, folk-belief, and popular mythology touching the Buddha and his many incarnations, which crystallized round about His personality in much the same way as the matter of the Arthurian Legend crystallized round about King Arthur, during the third century after His death —attributes to Him many previous births in sub-human form; and although the esotericist would concede that in remote aeons of evolution such incarnations could possibly have been really sub-human, he would give to such of them as may have occurred in this world-period a symbolical significance, whereas the orthodox Theravādist interprets all of them literally.

In any case, a literal interpretation of the Jātaka—seeing that it is, according to the esotericist, essentially an exoteric treatise designed for the people —appears to be more plausible than that of the Dulva account of the Buddha’s birth. Furthermore, since there is a parallel account in the Pali Scriptures wherein the same animal symbol, namely, the six-tusked white elephant, is employed, we have here an example of the use of symbolism, definite in purpose, common to both Northern and Southern Buddhism, which even the exotericist could not but interpret symbolically.

Similarly, as the popular interpretation appears to have fundamentally shaped the Jātaka, so it may have also affected the compilation of the Bardo Thödol; for like all treatises which have had at least a germ-origin in very ancient times and then grown up by the ordinary process of amalgamating congenial material, the Bardo Thödol, as a Doctrine of Death and Rebirth, seems to have existed at first unrecorded, like almost all sacred books now recorded in Pali, Sanskrit, or Tibetan, and was a growth of unknown centuries. Then by the time it had fully developed and been set down in writing