ABSTRACT
This study has three main goals: first, to suggest what kind of enterprise Buddhist intellectuals were engaged in when they began to construct systematic theories about the properties essential to a Buddha; second, to offer a moderately detailed presentation of one such systematic theory, that of classical Indian Yogācāra; third, to engage in a critical, though very tentative and preliminary, comparison of this system with one example of a Christian intellectual's attempt to delineate the properties essential to God.
