The incarnate Buddhas and Bodhisattvas of Tibet are a travesty of the Mahayana which on Indian soil adhered to the sound doctrine that saints are known by their achievements as men and cannot be selected among infant prodigies.[14] It was the general though not universal opinion that one who had entered on the career of a Bodhisattva could not fall so low as to be reborn in any state of punishment, but the spirit of humility and self-effacement which has always marked the Buddhist ideal tended to represent his triumph as incalculably distant.  Meanwhile, although in the whirl of births he was on the upward grade, he yet had his ups and downs and there is no evidence that Indian or Far Eastern Buddhists arrogated to themselves special claims and powers on the ground that they were well advanced in the career of Buddhahood.  The vow to suppress self and follow the light not only in this life but in all future births contains an element of faith or fantasy, but has any religion formed a nobler or even equivalent picture of the soul’s destiny or built a better staircase from the world of men to the immeasurable spheres of the superhuman?

One aspect of the story of Sakyamuni and his antecedent births thus led to the idea that all may become Buddhas.  An equally natural development in another direction created celestial and superhuman Bodhisattvas.  The Hinayana held that Gotama, before his last birth, dwelt in the Tushita heaven enjoying the power and splendour of an Indian god and it looked forward to the advent of Maitreya.  But it admitted no other Bodhisattvas, a consequence apparently of the doctrine that there can only be one Buddha at a time.  But the luxuriant fancy of India, which loves to multiply divinities, soon broke through this restriction and fashioned for itself beautiful images of benevolent beings who refuse the bliss of Nirvana that they may alleviate the sufferings of others.[15] So far as we can judge, the figures of these Bodhisattvas took shape just about the same time that the personalities of Vishnu and Siva were acquiring consistency.  The impulse in both cases is the same, namely the desire to express in a form accessible to human prayer and sympathetic to human emotion the forces which rule the universe.  But in this work of portraiture the Buddhists laid more emphasis on moral and spiritual law than did the Brahmans:  they isolated in personification qualities not found isolated in nature.  Siva is the law of change, of death and rebirth, with all the riot of slaughter and priapism which it entails:  Vishnu is the protector and preserver, the type of good energy warring against evil, but the unity of the figure is smothered by mythology and broken up into various incarnations.  But Avalokita and Manjusri, though they had not such strong roots in Indian humanity as Siva and Vishnu, are genii of purer and brighter presence.  They are the personifications of kindness and knowledge.  Though manifold in shape, they