Transitoriness and Transformations 87I also call a man of four qualities very wise, a superman. And what
are those qualities? (1) He concerns himself with the advantage and
the welfare of the great masses of people, many are the folk he has
established in the Ariyan system, that is in the beauty of righteousness
as set forth in the Ariyan path. (2) He can think about a thing or not,
just as he wishes; he can harbour an aspiration or not, just as he
wishes. Thus is he master of his mind in the trends of thought. (3) He
can enter at his pleasure without toil or trouble into the four ecstasies
that are beyond thought and yet pertain to this present life. (4) He has
put away the intoxications arising from lust and becomings from
speculation and ignorance. Thus does he gain and abide in that sane
emancipation of heart and mind that he knows and realises even in
this present life (Rhys Davids 1921: 134).This is a statement of nibbanahere and now, as a psychological
state marked by freedom from passion and control over the mind
while compassion and love (karuna and metta) remain. However,
the magical 32 marks appear in early Buddhist sources, and influ-
enced the depiction of the Buddha in sculpture. The fact is that
while the Buddha himself may have defined a ‘superman’ in social
and psychological terms, social expectations looked for something
superhuman, and their impact on the nature of developments in
Buddhism is evident.
The Buddha had to cast his teachings in terms of the expectations
and the capabilities of his audience. He fought against ritualism,
superstition and hero-worship, dependence on a god, and the elab-
oration of cosmologies, refusing to even call himself the head of the
Sangha. In their place he substituted righteousness, a concern for
mass welfare, and control of mental aspirations, thoughts and emo-
tions. But the prevalence in society of the need for cosmologies, a
god, and ritualism made it almost inevitable that these would enter
into Buddhism itself.Buddhism and Language
‘Popular Buddhism’ almost by definition is in the language of the
people. Most existing Buddhist literature is not. Sanskrit, obvi-
ously, was the language of intellectuals and to some extent the
court elites; but the Pali canon was written in a language that was3
Transitoriness
3. Transitoriness and Transformations
‘All is flux.’ The principle of aniccawas fundamental to Buddhism,
and the Buddha applied it to the Dhamma itself when he predicted
that it would die away after some centuries. There are different
forms of ‘dying away’—vanishing as a name and symbol, and
vanishing in actuality, i.e., being transformed into something else in
the normal social process of becoming institutionalised. The trans-
formations of the Dhamma, through Theravada and Mahayana and
Vajrayana, have been so great as to lead a scholar like Richard
Gombrich to even question whether there is an underlying core in
all the three forms that would allow them to be all called by the
same name of ‘Buddhism’ (Gombrich 1997: 6).
Some of the special problems of Buddhism may have arisen from
the fact that its rigorous moral orientation to individual discipline
has been difficult to assimilate as a social phenomenon. So little
concession has been made to social and psychological ‘needs’ for a
religion that the pressures to actually change the basic teachings
must have been great. Perhaps this has been the basis of the story
that the Buddha was originally reluctant to teach, thinking that
there would be little basis for humans to absorb his insight.
The problem might be illustrated by the Lakkhana Sutta of the
Digha Nikayain which the Buddha is shown to have the 32 physical
characteristics that constitute the ‘marks of a superman’, signs belong-
ing to one who will either become a world monarch or a supreme
Buddha. In his introduction to this sutta, Rhys Davids argues that
these ‘lakkhana’ were drawn from brahmanic traditions and argues
that Buddha in effect replied very differently to what makes a man
‘very wise or a superman’: