Elvis Sightings

It is my impression that the Mahayana forefathers developed the idea of the bodhisattva as a response to a decline of Buddhism. With fewer and fewer people attaining enlightenment (decades after the passing of the Master Teacher), they needed to give practitioners something to shoot for if it seemed to them that it was unlikely that they would attain actual Buddhahood.

With a more easily attainable goal in hand (being a bodhisattva, if you couldn’t become a Buddha, i.e. fully enlightened) it gave practical reasons for people to continue with their practice, and it also gave them a moral framework that they could follow. If they couldn’t live life as a full-fledged Buddha (instinctively knowing what to do), then they could live life with the guidance of the way of the bodhisattva. With a framework of morals filling in where inner guidance lacked.

I don’t think of the eightfold path as being provisional. They are embodiment of the virtues of the Buddha, of the Truth. Rather than being a path to “something”, I see them as a realization of that “something” within the space-time realm.