(1) Buddhism is a religion founded about five or six centuries before the Christian era by Gautama, the Buddha, who was born in Central India.
According to H. G. Wells' Outline of History published in 1920, it is about a half century since the life and teachings of the Buddha was clarified. His teachings are simple and plain easily understood even by the modern.
(2) During the few centuries following the death of the Buddha, however, the Buddhist order lost its elasticity assuming a state of ossification. It lost sight of the real raison d'etre and came to hold its maintenance and prosperity as its highest aim.
The ossification was due to the fact that the four factors which formed the Buddhist order-priests and lay believers of both sexes-lacked harmonious co-operation for the furtherance of their common end. In the days of the Buddha, there was teamwork among these four factors and they together strove for the realization of the supreme objective of Buddhism-the attainment of Buddhahood. In later times the priests, having been held in great reverence by lay believers, came to consider themselves as superior beings, and in order to sustain their respect and also to show a strong front to other religions then in existence, built up a sort of philosophy of great complicity. Such philosophy was foreign to Buddhism in its original form. It aimed at the salvation of one's own self through the renouncement of the world.
(3) To relieve the situation, there arose the so-called Mahayana Buddhism. It rejected the sense of superiority and the self-complacency of the priests and insisted that those who had grasped the essence of the faith, be they laymen, were more in accord with the will of the Buddha than the priests who adhered to the fixed formalities. Thus it was that the idea of Buddhisattiva, the prominent feature of Mahayana Buddhism, was born.
(4) As its characteristic, the idea of Boddhisattiva treats man as a social being. In this connection the Sutra of the Lotus, one of the scriptures of Mahayana Buddhism, says, “Not stained by the ways of the world like the lotus in water.” In this context both “the world” and “water” signify society. Man, being a social being, so teaches the idea of Boddhisattiva, he could not achieve his own salvation independent of society. Here strong emphasis is laid on the ethics of creative altruism. May this not be interpreted as a discovery of “society” in Buddhist thought ?
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