ABSTRACT
Mahayana Buddhism is a system offering many different means of cultivating the Way, some suited to people with simple goals, others requiring immense and unflagging dedication. Though the Buddhist and Taoist systems of belief and practice differ in some respects, their philosophic base is virtually one and the same. Like the Buddha himself, Buddhists accept the existence of various orders of supernatural beings, but set no store by them in the context of cultivating the Way. The Buddha’s oral teachings were memorised and transmitted from teacher to disciple for several generations before being committed to writing, so there was room for divergences of interpretation to creep in. Buddhas and Bodhisattvas as emanations of their own minds, or as embodiments of positive and negative psychological factors. The same is broadly true of several other Celestial Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, who may be regarded either as actual beings or as embodiments of qualities and energies for psychological purposes.
