Page:The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927).djvu/64

14 the higher Buddhism of the Northern School; the Exoteric Trinity being, as in the Southern School, the Buddha, the Dharma (or Scriptures), the Saṅgha (or Priesthood). Regarded in this way—the one trinitarian doctrine as esoteric, the other as exoteric—there are direct correspondences between the two Trinities. Detailed and comprehensive understanding of the Tri-Kāya Doctrine, so the lāmas teach, is the privilege of initiates, who, alone, are fitted to grasp and to realize it.

The translator himself regarded the Tri-Kāya Doctrine as having been transmitted by along and unbroken line of initiates, some Indian, some Tibetan, direct from the days of the Buddha. He considered that the Buddha, having re-discovered it, was merely its Transmitter from preceding Buddhas; that it was handed on orally, from guru to guru, and not committed to writing until comparatively recent times, when Buddhism began to decay, and there were not always sufficient living gurus to transmit it in the old way. The theory of Western scholars, that simply because a doctrine is not found recorded before a certain time it consequently did not exist previously, he—as an initiate—laughed at; and the rather strenuous efforts of Christian apologists to claim for the Tri-Kāya Doctrine a Christian origin he held, likewise, to be wholly untenable. He had been a close and sympathetic student of Christianity; and, as a young man, he had been much sought after by Christian missionaries, who looked upon him, with his remarkable learning and superior social standing, as an unusually desirable subject for conversion. He carefully examined their claims, and then rejected them, on the ground that, in his opinion, Christianity, as presented by them, is but an imperfect Buddhism, that the Aṣokan Buddhist missionaries to Asia Minor and Syria, as to Alexandria, must have profoundly influenced Christianity through some such probable connecting link as the Essenes, that, if Jesus were an historical character, He, being—as the Lāma interpreted the Jesus of the New Testament clearly to be—a Bodhisattva (i.e. a Candidate for Buddhahood), was, undoubtedly, well acquainted with