but when he is accurately distinguished from Amitayus (and frequently they are regarded as synonyms) he is made the more remote and ethereal of the two.  Amitayus with his rich ornaments and his flask containing the water of eternal life is the ideal of a splendidly beneficent saviour and represents the Sambhoga-kaya.[93] Sakyamuni is the same beneficent being shrunk into human form.  But this is only one aspect, and not the most important, of the doctrine of the three bodies.  We can easily understand the Sambhoga-kaya and Nirmana-kaya:  they correspond to a deity such as Vishnu and his incarnation Krishna, and they are puzzling in Buddhism simply because we think naturally of the older view (not entirely discarded by the Mahayana) which makes the human Buddha the crown and apex of a series of lives that find in him their fulfilment.  But it is less easy to understand the Dharma-kaya.

The word should perhaps be translated as body of the law and the thought originally underlying it may have been that the essential nature of a Buddha, that which makes him a Buddha, is the law which he preaches.  As we might say, the teacher lives in his teaching:  while it survives, he is active and not dead.

The change from metaphor to theology is illustrated by Hsuean Chuang when he states[94] (no doubt quoting from his edition of the Pitakas) that Gotama when dying said to those around him “Say not that the Tathagata is undergoing final extinction:  his spiritual presence abides for ever unchangeable.”  This apparently corresponds to the passage in the Pali Canon,[95] which runs “It may be that in some of you the thought may arise, the word of the Master is ended:  we have no more a teacher.  But it is not thus that you should regard it.  The truths and the rules which I have set forth, let them, after I am gone, be the Teacher to you.”  But in Buddhist writings, including the oldest Pali texts, Dharma or Dhamma has another important meaning.  It signifies phenomenon or mental state (the two being identical for an idealistic philosophy) and comprises both the external and the internal world.  Now the Dharma-kaya is emphatically not a phenomenon but it may be regarded as the substratum or totality of phenomena or as that which gives phenomena whatever reality they possess and the double use of the word dharma rendered such divagations of meaning easier.[96] Hindus have a tendency to identify being and knowledge.  According to the Vedanta philosophy he who knows Brahman, knows that he himself is Brahman and therefore he actually is Brahman.  In the same way the true body of the Buddha is prajna or knowledge.[97] By this is meant a knowledge which transcends the distinction between subject and object and which sees that neither animate beings nor inanimate things have individuality or separate existence.  Thus the Dharma-kaya being an intelligence which sees the illusory quality of the world and also how the illusion originates[98] may be regarded as the origin and ground of all phenomena.