owledge which
destroys all cleaving to existence. A Buddha is a being who, in
consequence of having reached the Buddhaship, which implies the
possession of infinite goodness, infinite power, and infinite
wisdom, is able to teach men that true knowledge which secures
emancipation.

The Buddhaship that is, the possession of Supreme Godhead is open
to every one, though few ever acquire it. Most wonderful and
tremendous is the process of its attainment. Upon a time, some
being, perhaps then incarnate as a mosquito alighting on a muddy
leaf in some swamp, pauses for a while to muse. Looking up through
infinite stellar systems, with hungry love and boundless ambition,
to the throne and sceptre of absolute immensity, he vows within
himself, "I will become a Buddha." The total influences of his
past, the forces of destiny, conspiring with his purpose,
omnipotence is in that resolution. Nothing shall ever turn him
aside from it. He might soon acquire for himself deliverance from
the dreadful vortex of births; but, determined to achieve the
power of delivering others from their miseries as sentient beings,
he voluntarily throws himself into the stream of successive
existences, and with divine patience and fortitude undergoes every
thing.

From that moment, no matter in what form he is successively born,
whether as a disgusting bug, a white elephant, a monarch, or a
god, he is a Bodhisat, that is, a candidate pressing towards the
Buddhaship. He at once begins practising the ten primary virtues,
called paramitas, necessary for the securing of his aim. The
period required for the full exercise of one of these virtues is a
bhumi. Its duration is thus illustrated. Were a Bodhisat once in a
thousand births to shed a single drop of blood, he would in the
space of a bhumi shed more blood than there is water in a thousand
oceans. On account of his merit he might always be born amidst the
pleasures of the heavens; but since he could there make no
progress towards his goal, he prefers being born in the world of
men. During his gradual advance, there is no good he does not
perform, no hardship he does not undertake, no evil he does not
willingly suffer; and all for the benefit of others, to obtain the
means of emancipating those whom he sees fastened by ignorance in
the afflictive circle of acts. Wherever born, acting, or
suffering, his eye is still turned towards that EMPTY THRONE, at
the apex of the universe, from which the last Buddh