110 CHAPTER FIVEDharma." When the early sects agreed that the Buddha embodied the
Dharma, it was not that they were personifying the teaching, but that in their
view the Buddha actualized the Dharma, which his teaching then revealed.
From this background it should be clear that the religious fervor the
Mahayanists brought to their worship of the Cosmic Buddhas as the embodi-
ment of the hypostatic Dharma was not entirely unprecedented in the Bud-
dhist tradition. What was new was the cosmology: the landscape in which
Awakening is to be pursued, the role of the Buddha and Dharma in relation
to the creation of the cosmos, and the ground rules for negotiating one's way
through it. No longer was one confined to one's own abilities or to this mis-
erable world as the primary means and arena for the practice. Through faith in
the Cosmic Buddhas, combined with a moral life, one could be reborn in an
idyllic Buddha-land beyond the realm of saq1sara, where the great Buddha in
charge of the land would provide assistance in the remaining steps along the
way to Awakening.
5.5.1 Multiple Bodies of the Buddha
and the Buddha-Lands
From the beginning, the Buddha was held to have two types of kaya (body):
the riipa-kaya (physical or form-body) and the nirma!_la-kaya (apparition-bod-
ies) that he could conjure up through his supernormal powers. There was also
the sense that he embodied the Dharma, although this concept was not reified
(made into a thing) until the rise of the Mahasanghikas, who held that the
true Buddha was transcendent, as was the process of dependent co-arising,
which, though not personalized, fulfilled many of the functions of a Creator
in its role of giving rise to experienced phenomena. As we noted previously
(see Section 4.3), these two concepts eventually fused and led to the identifi-
cation of the true Buddha with the Dharmakaya (Dharma-body) at the same
time that the concept of the true Dharma was being converted to a metaphys-
ical absolute, the basic creative principle operative throughout the cosmos and
immanent in all things. Because this doctrine also held that all conditioned
phenomena were illusory, it reduced the status of the Buddha's physical body
to an apparition body (Strong EB, sec. 5.1). Because the early texts main-
tained that the Buddha could create many apparition-bodies at once, it stood
to reason that there should be apparition-bodies in all times and places; that
benevolent omnipotence should respond to the needs of all suffering beings.
Thus Buddhas must currently be elsewhere in the universe, as well as in the
past and future of this world-realm.
Early Buddhist cosmology had posited only one lokadhatu (world system),
consisting of four continents on Earth together with assorted hells below and
heavens above. Later the belief arose that a universe in which a Buddha acts
consists of one billion such worlds (a so-called great chiliocosm). In the 10 di-
rections (east, southeast, south, southwest, west, northwest, north, northeast,
nadir, and zenith), there are universes "as numerous as the sands of the
Ganges." Some but not all of these universes are Buddha-lands, in each of
which a Tathagata lives and teaches the Dharma.