Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 21.djvu/51

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I.
INTRODUCTORY.
3

Upananda 1 , the venerable Sundara-Nanda[1], the venerable Pllraa Maitrdya^tputra, the venerable SubhAti, the venerable RAhula ; with them yet other great disciples, as the venerable Ananda, still under training, and two thousand other monks, some of whom still under training, the others masters ; with six thousand nuns having at their head Mah&pra^Apati 3 , and the nun Yarodhari, the mother of R&hula, along with her train; (further) with eighty thousand Bddhisattvas, all unable to slide back *, endowed with the spells of supreme, perfect enlightenment, firmly standing in wisdom ; who moved onward the never deviating[2] wheel of the law; who had propitiated many hundred thousands of Buddhas ; who under many hundred thousands of Buddhas had planted the roots of goodness, had been intimate with many hundred thousands of Buddhas, were in body and mind fully penetrated with the feeling of charity ; able in communicating the wisdom of the Tath&gatas ; very wise, having reached the perfection of wisdom ; renowned in many hundred thousands of worlds; having saved many hundred thousand myriads 6 of kotis[3] of beings; such as the Bodhisattva Mahâ-

Surnamed *SSkyaputra ; Mah&vaggal, 52.

Gautami, the aunt of Gautama Buddha.

Or, to swerve from their course.


I have followed Burnouf in translating nayuta by ten thousand; this being the value of the Sanskrit term ayuta. According to the Petersburg Dictionary the Northern Buddhists attach to nayuta the value of 100,000 millions. The Pili n ah uta is said to be a vast number, one followed by twenty-eight ciphers; but in Spence Hardy's Manual of Buddhism, p. 193, its worth is put down at a myriad.


  1. Known from Lalita-vistara, p. 164; Burnouf has Sunanda.
  2. Or, never rolling back.
  3. I. e. ten millions.

B 2