series of
supernatural teachers, each with the same life-history, and this life
is connected with the whole course of nature, as is shown by the
sympathetic earthquakes which mark its crises. His birth is
supernatural and had he willed it he could have lived until the end of
the present Kalpa.[171] So, too, the nature of a Buddha when he is
released from form, that is after death, is deep and unfathomable as
the ocean.[172] The Kathavatthu condemns the ideas (thus showing that
they existed) that Buddhas are born in all quarters of the universe,
that the Buddha was superhuman in the ordinary affairs of life, that
he was not really born in the world of men and that he did not preach
the Law himself. These last two heresies are attributed by the
commentary to the Vetulyakas who are said to have believed that he
remained in the Tushita heaven and sent a phantom to preach on earth.
Here we have the rudiments of the doctrine afterwards systematized
under the name of the three bodies of Buddha. Similarly though Nirvana
is regarded as primarily an ethical state, the Pali Canon contains the
expression Nirvanadhatu and the idea[173] that Nirvana is a sphere or
realm (_ayatanam_) which transcends the transitory world and in which
such antitheses are coming and going, birth and death, cease to exist.
This foreshadows the doctrine of Bhuta-tathata and we seem to hear a
prelude to the dialectic of Nagarjuna when the Kathavatthu discusses
whether Sunnata or the void is predicable of the Skandhas and when it
condemns the views that anything now existing existed in the past: and
that knowledge of the present is possible (whereas the moment anything
is known it is really past). The Kathavatthu also condemns the
proposition that a Bodhisattva can be reborn in realms of woe or fall
into error, and this proposition hints that the career of a
Bodhisattva was considered of general interest.

The Mahayana grows out of the Hinayana and in many respects the
Hinayana passes into it and is preserved unchanged. It is true that in
reading the Lotus we wonder how this marvellous cosmic vision can
represent itself as the teaching of Gotama, but the Buddhacarita of
Asvaghosha, though embellished with literary mythology, hardly
advances in doctrine beyond the Pali sutras describing the marvels of
the Buddha's nativity[174] and the greater part of Nagarjuna's
Friendly Epistle, which purports to contain an epitome of the faith,
is in phraseology as well