Lokottaravāda

• 1. Introduction

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  Lokottaravāda is the name of an early Buddhist school known partly through a monastery its monks left behind in the mountains of Afghanistan. In the 7th century, the Chinese monk Xuanzang visited that monastery, at a site called Bamyan. Centuries afterward, archaeologists rediscovered the same mountainside and began recovering what its monks had left in the ruins. According to later Mahāyāna doxographers, including Bhāviveka and Vinitadeva, this school split off from a larger early movement called the Mahāsāṃghika. Its very name carries a doctrinal claim, one that would later become central to how Mahāyāna Buddhists thought about the nature of a Buddha. So what set the Lokottaravādins apart enough to be remembered by that specific name? And what can a ruined monastery in the Hindu Kush still tell us about the early history of Mahāyāna Buddhism?

• 2. A Name for the Transcendent

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  The Sanskrit word lokottara means supramundane, or transcendent, and it gave the school its full name: those who follow the transcendent teachings. Every Mahāsāṃghika group, not just this one, appears to have accepted some version of those transcendent teachings. That leaves a puzzle historians still work through: a name meant to set a group apart, attached to a belief its relatives already shared. The label stuck all the same, and it followed the school as it moved far from where the wider Mahāsāṃghika movement began.

• 3. From Magadha to the Northwest

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  Two texts, the Śāriputraparipṛcchā and the Samayabhedoparacanaćakra, trace the Lokottaravādins back to two other groups, the Ekavyāvahārikas and the Kukkuṭikas. The wider Mahāsāṃghika movement first took hold around Magadha, but the Lokottaravādins themselves are known to have flourished further away, in Northwest India.

  Paramārtha, an Indian monk writing in the 6th century CE, recorded a key turning point. Two hundred years after the Buddha, he wrote, much of the school moved north of Rājagṛha. There, the group split over a single question: whether the Mahāyāna teachings belonged formally inside their Tripiṭaka, their canon of scripture. The result was three factions, divided by how far each was willing to go in accepting the authority of those Mahāyāna texts. The Lokottaravādins took the most accepting position of the three: they treated the Mahāyāna sūtras as buddhavacana, the actual words of the Buddha.

• 4. The Mahāvastu

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  The Mahāvastu is a rare thing: a Mahāsāṃghika text that survives whole in its original Sanskrit. It presents itself as a biography of the Buddha, and it attributes itself directly to the Lokottaravādins. It appears to form an extended part of their Vinaya, their monastic code. Copies of its Sanskrit text survived because Mahāyāna Buddhists in Nepal kept them in their libraries.

  Some scholars trace a second text back to this same milieu: the longer Infinite Life Sūtra, part of the Sukhāvatīvyūha literature. One view holds that Mahīśāsaka monastics in Gandhāra compiled it during the Kushan Empire, in the first and second centuries CE. But the sūtra shares enough material with the Mahāvastu that it may owe a real debt to the Lokottaravādins as well. Its earliest translations carry traces of an original written in Gāndhārī.

• 5. Manuscripts of Bamiyan

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  Birch bark and palm-leaf manuscripts from that monastery's own collection have survived, including a number of Mahāyāna sūtras. They are now held in the Schøyen Collection. Some of these manuscripts are written in Gāndhārī, using the Kharosthi script, while others are in Sanskrit, written in Gupta scripts.

  Among the identified fragments is a Prātimokṣa Vibhaṅga specific to the Mahāsāṃghika-Lokottaravāda, catalogued as manuscript 2382/269. Others draw from the Āgamas: a Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra, numbered 2179/44, and a Caṃkī Sūtra, numbered 2376. The Caṃkī Sūtra corresponds to the Caṅkī Sutta known from the Pali Canon. The remaining fragments are Mahāyāna sūtras. A Diamond Sūtra and a Bhaiṣajyaguru Sūtra were catalogued together as manuscript 2385. Four more texts were grouped under manuscript 2378: the Śrīmālādevī Siṃhanāda Sūtra, the Pravāraṇa Sūtra, the Sarvadharmapravṛttinirdeśa Sūtra and the Ajātaśatrukaukṛtyavinodana Sūtra. A separate fragment preserves part of the Śāriputrābhidharma Śāstra, numbered 2375/08.

• 6. A Difference in Geography

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  Tāranātha viewed the Ekavyāvahārikas, the Lokottaravādins and the Gokulikas as essentially a single group. He went further, treating the term Ekavyāvahārika as something close to a general label for the whole Mahāsāṃghika movement. Vasumitra's earlier Samayabhedoparacanaćakra reached a similar conclusion, describing these same three groups as doctrinally indistinguishable from one another. What separated the Lokottaravādins from their relatives, in other words, looks like geography rather than belief.

  One belief they did hold, emptiness or śūnyatā in Sanskrit, was shared rather than distinctive. The Lokottaravādins taught that nothing in the world is real except two kinds of emptiness. One is the emptiness of a self, pudgalaśūnyatā, and the other is the emptiness of phenomena, dharmaśūnyatā. That same two-fold framing of emptiness later became one of the defining features of Mahāyāna Buddhism itself.

• 7. The Buddha Beyond the World

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  Vasumitra counted 48 theses shared by the Ekavyāvahārikas, the Lokottaravādins and the Gokulikas, according to his Samayabhedoparacanaćakra. Of those 48, 20 concern the supramundane nature of buddhas and bodhisattvas specifically. The text credits these four groups with the view that a Buddha can know every dharma in a single moment of mind. It then lists the qualities that make a Buddha's nature transcendent. He has no defilements. Every one of his utterances serves his teaching, and he can express his entire doctrine in a single utterance. Everything he says is true. His body, his power, called prabhāva, and his lifespan are all said to be limitless. He never tires of guiding beings toward enlightenment or of awakening pure faith in them. He does not sleep or dream, he never pauses before answering a question, and he remains constantly in meditation, or samādhi.

  The Buddha himself, in this view, is lokottara, transcendent, and his life and physical body are treated as mere appearance rather than literal reality. The Lokottaravāda school kept the wider Mahāsāṃghika position that arhats remain imperfect and fallible, unlike a Buddha.

  The Lokottaravādins' own Mahāvastu frames Buddhism around Three Vehicles, and it includes detailed instructions on the Bodhisattva Path and the practices expected of a bodhisattva. It describes a bodhisattva's progress toward enlightenment as passing through ten grounds, or bhūmis, the same number of stages later required of Mahāyāna bodhisattvas. These bhūmis resemble the ten stages set out in the Mahāyāna Ten Stages Sūtra, though the stage names differ somewhat between the two texts.

• 8. Buddhas Without Number

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  The Mahāvastu also describes countless Pure Lands, or buddha-fields, each one populated by its own buddhas and by tenth-ground bodhisattvas destined to become buddhas themselves. Every one of these buddhas is said to lead limitless numbers of beings to liberation. Yet however many beings reach liberation, the text treats the total number of sentient beings as still, in effect, infinite.

  One passage in the Mahāvastu describes a crowd of devas setting up sunshades to honor the Buddha. In response, the Buddha appears to sit beneath every single sunshade at once. Each deva believes he alone has been singled out for the honor. None of them realizes that the Buddha he sees is no different from the one every other deva sees. The Śūraṅgama Samādhi Sūtra tells a strikingly similar story. In it, the Buddha sits at once on countless lion-thrones set up by devas. Each deva perceives only the Buddha sitting on his own throne. When the illusion is finally lifted, all the buddhas are revealed together. One deva then asks which Buddha is the real one, his own or all the others. The sūtra's answer: all of them are equally real, because a Buddha's nature is never separate from any phenomenon.

  The Mahāvastu returns repeatedly to a single figure among these future buddhas: Maitreya. The text says he will be only one of a thousand buddhas destined to follow Gautama Buddha. That number sets the Mahāsāṃghika-Lokottaravāda tradition apart from the Theravāda, which counts only five buddhas as destined to follow Gautama.