The Great Being, Mahāsattva

Bodhisattva Mahāsattva, Great Awakening Beings, make their appearance around the beginning of the Common Era. In painting and sculpture they are depicted as clad not in the patchwork robes of the monk—Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva is the exception—but in princely raiment, adorned with coronets, bangles and necklaces. They are sometimes shown in the posture of royal ease. Such bodhisattvas are not merely beings who aspire to awaken, boon companions in the process of self-transformation, and background figures in the scenes of Lord Buddha’s discourses. They are adepts and teachers in their own right, capable of instructing and assisting ordinary people. The social matrix from which they emerge is different from that of the Buddha’s day. Their courtly appearance marks the transition from republican to feudal forms of political organization, which change itself is mirrored in the ascendancy of the role of the authoritarian guru as contrasted with the relatively egalitarian relations within the early monastic community. In Buddhist art and literature of the Mahayana, the Great Beings rise to a status nearly equal to that of the Buddha. In certain forms of popular worship they surpass it. Bodhisattvas also appear as the central figures in scriptures such as the Prajnāpāramitāhrdāya, the Vimalakirtinirdesa, and the Avatamsaka.

Unlike the Buddha, who escapes from the round of birth and death, and attains an indescribable mode of being, the Mahāsattva, although possessed of liberating knowledge and conduct, remains in the world to help all who suffer in the six realms. The wide-ranging activity and multiple roles of the Mahāsattvas bespeak a conception of liberation that is compatible with embodied human existence. Worldly enlightenment also harmonizes well with the doctrine of a fundamental, inherent Buddhahood that extends even to the inanimate, and the increasingly “ecological” interpretation of interdependent causal-conditionality (pratītya-samutpāda.)

“The Buddha said to Drdhamati, “It is a Samādhi called the Concentration of Heroic Progress (surangama samādhi). Bodhisattvas who have obtained this samādhi can, since you ask about it, manifest Parinirvāna, but without definitively ceasing to be.’”

--Śūrangama Samādhi Sutra

That hallowing of the world also accords with the tantric goal of banishing the very notion of impurity. To borrow the words attributed to the sage, Bodhidharma, “In heaven and earth, nothing holy,” which is just to say, “Everything is holy.” Thus, an inconceivably great multitude of Awakening Beings is said to permeate the universe (or multiverse). That vision of enlightenment’s plenitude is also an expression of the fundamental luminosity and self-transcendence of everything in nature. For followers of the Way, the Mahāsattvas are the focus of aspiration and the embodiment of the awakened life as it is seen to work in the world at all times and in all places.