Sublime

“Lord of Lanka, this teaching is the pinnacle of Mahayana understanding, for it enables practitioners to achieve self–realization and to enjoy higher levels of existence.

What Mollier reveals in the second half of the first millennium is a feverish traffic between the Daoists and the Buddhists of mutual appropriations, falsifications, denials, excisions of telltale signs or ‘cut and paste’, and reformatting in the competitive environment of court and society. Thus, an apocryphal sutra has the Buddha preach that life

It can be practised by regular practitioners—and to a certain degree by people who are not Buddhist—but this is not the audience to whom the Nyi-da Mélong is speaking.

As the yogin Saraha said: When the teacher’s words enter your heart It is like finding a treasure in the palm of your hand.40

The Buddha is an arhan because he is free of passion and will not be reborn, a sugata because he has gone beyond this mundane world, a tathagata because he has come back to teach others, and a fully-enlightened one because there is nothing of which he is not aware.

The almost-capital Amaravati and several Buddhist stupas in the north-east districts of Srikakulam are testimony to their influence. Later, different sects of Hinduism, such as Shaivism, Vaishnavism, Madhavism and Advaitism, dictated popular belief.

There are ‘natural sages’[129] who have discovered something quite close to the outer functional parameters of the Nyi-da Mélong – simply through being thoroughly good and decent people.