One of the more interesting features of the Great Vehicle, or Mahāyāna School of Buddhism, is the system of the Three Bodies. Being at first a ‘ Buddhology,’ a speculative doctrine of the Buddhahood, this system was afterwards made to cover the whole field of dogmatic, of ontology, and was in particular substituted for the antiquated ‘ dependent origination’ (pratītyasamutpāda). At first the Buddhas alone had three ‘ Bodies’ ; afterwards the whole universe was looked upon as residing in or made of the Bodies. Later, or by parallel development, new mythological, mystic, and physiological reveries caused serious alterations of the primitive ‘ trinitarian’ form, and in particular the addition of two more Bodies to the ‘ classical’ ones ; and the Tantric school, in its own fanciful, mystic, and theurgic way, reduced the speculative system to a mere practical method of Yoga.
