the Hindu belief that enlightened beings may chose to return to the world out of compassion for those still enmeshed in saṁsāra, a notion more fully developed in the Mahāyāna Buddhist notion of the Bodhisattva.

For example, Master Linji invented the term the “businessless person,” the person who has nothing to do and nowhere to go. This was his ideal example of what a person could be. In Theravada Buddhism, the ideal person was the arhat, someone who practiced to attain enlightenment. In Mahayana Buddhism, the ideal person was the bodhisattva, a compassio