To Light a Thousand Lamps - The Theosophical Society

The Pāramitās / 141
soil of his awakening consciousness. He made an earnest
resolve to become ripe in wisdom and magnanimous of
heart. Projecting his vision far into the future, he wills to
build a raft of the dharma that he might ferry numberless
millions over the ocean of illusion and pain to the other
shore of freedom and light.
Way back then the Buddha of history was an ordinary
person, aspiring, yes, but also, like ourselves, with character
weaknesses, karmic impediments from previous lives not yet
resolved. We may presume that he stumbled now and then
and had to retrieve lost ground, and also that his associates
in any one life may have received mixed karmic impingements
from his errors of judgment as well as from his victories
over self. It is no routine matter to go counter to the
general drift but, because his motive was selfless, his resolve
served as a steadying influence — life after life, the bodhisattva
ideal was his inspiration and guide. Assuredly his
ultimate triumph and renunciation would have thrice
blessed all whose karma he had a¤ected during his long
gestation from ordinary man to buddha.
Every life-spark is a bodhisattva, a christos, a god in
process of becoming. Hui-neng of China, the humble servant
in the temple, understood this, and when his inner
eye awakened and he became a Ch’an Buddhist master he
put it this way:
When not enlightened, buddhas are no other than ordinary
beings; when there is enlightenment, ordinary beings at
once turn into buddhas.*
*Cf. The Sutra of Hui-neng, trans. Thomas Cleary, p. 20.