ather, who proceeds to reveal gradually his name and
position, keeping back the full truth to the last. Similarly it is
held in the Far East that there were five periods in Sakyamuni's
teaching which after passing through the stage of the Hinayana
culminated in the Prajna-paramita and Amitabha sutras shortly before
his death. Such statements admit the historical priority of the
Hinayana: it is rudimentary (that is early) truth which needs
completion and expansion. Many critics demur to the assumption that
primitive Buddhism was a system of ethics purged of superstition and
mythology. And in a way they are right. Could we get hold of a
primitive Buddhist, we should probably find that miracles, magic, and
superhuman beings played a large part in his mind and that the Buddha
did not appear to him as what we call a human teacher. In that sense
the germs of the Mahayana existed in the life-time of Gotama. But the
difference between early and later Buddhism lies in this, that the
deities who surround the Buddha in the Pali Pitakas are mere
accessories: his teaching would not be affected if they were all
removed. But the Bodhisattvas in the Lotus or the Sutra of the Happy
Land have a doctrinal significance.

Though in India old ideas persist with unusual vitality, still even
there they can live only if they either develop or gather round them
new accretions. As one of the religions of India, Buddhism was
sensitive to the general movement of Indian thought, or rather it was
a part of that movement. We see as clearly in Buddhist as in
non-Buddhist India that there was a tendency to construct philosophic
systems and another tendency to create deities satisfying to the
emotions as well as to the intellect and yet another tendency to
compose new scriptures. But apart from this parallel development, it
becomes clear after the Christian era that Buddhism is becoming
surrounded by Hinduism. The influence is not indeed one-sided: there
is interdependence and interpenetration but the net result is that the
general Indian features of each religious period overpower the
specially Buddhist features and in the end we find that while Hinduism
has only been profoundly modified Buddhism has vanished.

If we examine the Pali Pitakas, including the heresies mentioned in
the Kathavatthu, we find that they contain the germs of many
Mahayanist ideas. Thus side by side with the human portrait of the
Buddha there is the doctrine that he is one in a