There is an interesting discourse describing the wonders that attend the birth of a Buddha[750], such as that he passes from the Tusita heaven to his mother’s womb; that she must die seven days after his birth:  that she stands when he is born:  and so on.  We may imagine that the death of the mother is due to the historical fact that Gotama’s mother did so die, while the other circumstances are embellishments of the old Buddha and Mahapurusha legend.  But the construction of this sutta is curious.  The monks in the Jetavana are talking of the wondrous powers possessed by Buddhas.  Gotama enters and asks what is the subject of their discourse.  They tell him and he bids Ananda describe more fully the wondrous attributes of a Buddha.  Ananda gives a long list of marvels and at the end Gotama observes, “Take note of this too as one of the wondrous attributes of a Buddha, that he has his feelings, perceptions and thoughts under complete control[751].”

No passage has yet been adduced from the suttas mentioning more than seven Buddhas but later books, such as the Buddha-vamsa and the introduction to the Jataka, describe twenty-five[752].  There are twenty-four Jain Tirthankaras and according to some accounts twenty-four incarnations of Vishnu.  Probably all these lists are based on some calculation as to the proper allowance of saints for an aeon.  The biographies of these Buddhas are brief and monotonous.  For each sage they record the number of his followers, the name of his city, parents, and chief disciples, the tree under which he attained enlightenment, his height and his age, both in extravagant figures.  They also record how each met Gotama in one of his previous births and prophesied his future glory.  The object of these biographies is less to give information about previous Buddhas than to trace the career of Gotama as a Bodhisattva.  This career began in the time of Dipankara, the first of the twenty-five Buddhas, incalculable ages ago, when Gotama was a hermit called Sumedha.  Seeing that the road over which Dipankara had to pass was dirty, he threw himself down in the mire in order that the Buddha might tread on him and not soil his feet.  At the same time he made a resolution to become a Buddha and received from Dipankara the assurance that ages afterwards his wish would be fulfilled.  This incident, called pranidhana or the vow to become a Buddha, is frequently represented in the frescoes found in Central Asia.

The history of this career is given in the introduction to the Jataka and in the late Pali work called the Cariya-pitaka, but the suttas make little reference to the topic.  They refer incidentally to Gotama’s previous births[753] but their interest clearly centres in his last existence.  They not infrequently use the word Bodhisattva to describe the youthful Gotama or some other Buddha before the attainment of Buddhahood, but in later literature it commonly designates a being now existing who will be a Buddha in the future.  In the older phase of Buddhism attention is concentrated on a human figure which fills the stage, but before the canon closes we are conscious of a change which paves the way for the Mahayana.  Our sympathetic respect is invited not only for Gotama the Buddha, but for the struggling Bodhisattva who, battling towards the goal with incredible endurance and self-sacrifice through lives innumerable, at last became Gotama.