riptures, and appears (for instance) in the Diamond
Cutter[106] which is still one of the most venerated books of devotion
in China and Japan. In this work the Buddha explains that a
Bodhisattva must resolve to deliver all living beings and yet must
understand that after he has thus delivered innumerable beings, no one
has been delivered. And why? Because no one is to be called a
Bodhisattva for whom there exists the idea of a being, or person.
Similarly a saint does not think that he is a saint, for if he did so
think, he would believe in a self, and a person. There occur
continually in this work phrases cast in the following form: "what was
preached as a store of merit, that was preached as no store of
merit[107] by the Tathagata and therefore it is called a store of
merit. If there existed a store of merit, the Tathagata would not have
preached a store of merit." That is to say, if I understand this dark
language rightly, accumulated merit is part of the world of illusion
which we live in and by speaking of it as he did the Buddha implied
that it, like everything else in the world, is really non-existent.
Did it belong to the sphere of absolute truth, he would not have
spoken of it as if it were one of the things commonly but erroneously
supposed to exist. Finally we are told of the highest knowledge "Even
the smallest thing is not known or perceived there; therefore it is
called the highest perfect knowledge." That is to say perfect
knowledge transcends all distinctions; it recognises the illusory
nature of all individuality and the truth of sameness, the
never-changing one behind the ever-changing many. In this sense it is
said to perceive nothing and know nothing.

One might expect that a philosophy thus prone to use the language of
extreme nihilism would slip into a destructive, or at least negative
system. But Mahayanism was pulled equally strongly in the opposite
direction by the popular and mythological elements which it contained
and was on the whole inclined to theism and even polytheism quite as
much as to atheism and acosmism. A modern Japanese writer[108] says
that Dharma-kaya "may be considered to be equivalent to the Christian
conception of the Godhead." This is excessive as a historical
statement of the view current in India during the early centuries of
our era, but it does seem true that Dharma-kaya was made the
equivalent of the Hindu conception of Param Brahma and also that it is
very nearly equiv