– P Roy
After the death of the Buddha, many ideas and beliefs of Hinduism were being modified by Buddhism outside the Buddhist organization, where within the organization, Buddhism itself was being slowly transformed. Buddhism grew and flourished inside the fold of Hinduism. Hence, it is not at all surprising in Kāśyapa Buddha, the last of the twenty-four Buddhas, whose lives are given in the Buddhavamśa of the Khuddaka Nikāya, is to be identified as the very Kāśyapa, credited with formulating the not-so-Vedic Pāñcarātra system of Vaiṣṇavism. In many cases, the Hindu and Buddhist traditions point to a common source. The influence of the Hindu mythology was at work when the worship of the two Bodhisattvas, Manjuśrī and Avalōkitēśvara, was practiced at the time of Fa Hian about 400 A.D. With the introduction of the Bodhisattva Vajradhara and Vajrapāṇi, this group of three formed a concept of Trinity parallel to that of the Hindu faith. In the Saddharma Puṇḍarīka, Gautama is represented as an omnipotent God, who descends to earth from time to time like Viṣṇu. The influence of the Bhagavadgītā here is very clear.
Then comes the theory of the Dhyānī Buddhas, whose number is infinite. But only five of them are recognized. Every Dhyānī Buddha is believed to have his pure counterpart in the ethereal world of idea and mystic trance. The name of the fourth Dhyānī Buddha is Amitābha, whose Bodhisattva is Avalōkitēśvara and whose earthly reflection is Gautama. The fifth one is Amōghasiddhi, whose human counterpart is Maitrēya, said to be the future Buddha. This theory was unknown to Buddhists even in the seventh century A.D. In the tenth century A.D., a new concept of ādi Buddha was added. It is strikingly common with the theory of avatāra, which seems to have influenced the former. The idea of the five vr̥ṣṇi heroes Saṅkarṣaṇa, Vāsudēva, Pradyumna, Sāmba and Aniruddha (enumerated in the Vāyu-purāṇa 97, 1-2) may be at the root of the concept of the five Dhyānī Buddhas.