mplete control[751]."

No passage has yet been adduced from the suttas mentioning more than
seven Buddhas but later books, such as the Buddha-vamsa and the
introduction to the Jataka, describe twenty-five[752]. There are
twenty-four Jain Tirthankaras and according to some accounts twenty-four
incarnations of Vishnu. Probably all these lists are based on some
calculation as to the proper allowance of saints for an aeon. The
biographies of these Buddhas are brief and monotonous. For each sage
they record the number of his followers, the name of his city, parents,
and chief disciples, the tree under which he attained enlightenment, his
height and his age, both in extravagant figures. They also record how
each met Gotama in one of his previous births and prophesied his future
glory. The object of these biographies is less to give information about
previous Buddhas than to trace the career of Gotama as a Bodhisattva.
This career began in the time of Dipankara, the first of the twenty-five
Buddhas, incalculable ages ago, when Gotama was a hermit called Sumedha.
Seeing that the road over which Dipankara had to pass was dirty, he
threw himself down in the mire in order that the Buddha might tread on
him and not soil his feet. At the same time he made a resolution to
become a Buddha and received from Dipankara the assurance that ages
afterwards his wish would be fulfilled. This incident, called pranidhana
or the vow to become a Buddha, is frequently represented in the frescoes
found in Central Asia.

The history of this career is given in the introduction to the Jataka
and in the late Pali work called the Cariya-pitaka, but the suttas make
little reference to the topic. They refer incidentally to Gotama's
previous births[753] but their interest clearly centres in his last
existence. They not infrequently use the word Bodhisattva to describe
the youthful Gotama or some other Buddha before the attainment of
Buddhahood, but in later literature it commonly designates a being now
existing who will be a Buddha in the future. In the older phase of
Buddhism attention is concentrated on a human figure which fills the
stage, but before the canon closes we are conscious of a change which
paves the way for the Mahayana. Our sympathetic respect is invited not
only for Gotama the Buddha, but for the struggling Bodhisattva who,
battling towards the goal with incredible endurance and self-sacrifice
through lives innumerable, at last became Got