Mahāsāṃghika

• 1. Introduction

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  Mahāsāṃghika, meaning "of the Great Sangha," was one of two communities formed when early Buddhism divided for the first time. Scholars Jan Nattier and Charles S. Prebish place that founding break at 116 years after the Buddha's nirvāṇa. From that fracture, the Mahāsāṃghika expanded into numerous sects throughout ancient India. The tradition is long gone. By the 7th century, the Chinese travelers Xuanzang and Yijing reported that the Mahāsāṃghika schools had essentially disappeared. What remained in their former territories was now described as Mahāyāna. Since at least Japan's Meiji period, researchers have looked to the Mahāsāṃghikas as an origin point for some of Buddhism's most distinctive ideas. What drove the original split? What did the Mahāsāṃghikas believe about the Buddha, the mind, and the nature of reality? And how did a school that vanished leave such a deep mark on one of the world's great religious traditions?

• 2. The Great Rupture

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  The Mahāsāṃghika Śāriputraparipṛcchā, the earliest surviving account of Buddhism's first schism, places the decisive council at Pāṭaliputra. Andrew Skilton has argued that this text resolves many of the contradictions found in rival accounts. Its story turns on a dispute of numbers: a minority of senior monks, the Sthaviras, sought to add new rules to the monastic code. The majority refused. The Mahāsāṃghikas understood this refusal not as rebellion but as fidelity. In their telling, the elders were the ones attempting to alter the original Vinaya, and the larger community simply held its ground.

  The Theravāda tradition contests this reading. It portrays the Mahāsāṃghikas as the group that modified the original rules. Scholars have found supporting evidence for the Mahāsāṃghika account. The Vinayas of Sthavira-derived schools contain more rules than the Mahāsāṃghika Vinaya does.

  The Sarvāstivāda school offers a different explanation for the schism, one focused on doctrine rather than Vinaya. It blames a figure named Mahadeva, who reportedly argued five divisive points. Four of them treated arhatship, the traditional goal of Buddhist practice, as still marked by ignorance and desire. Scholars now generally hold that the Mahadeva controversy arose later, within the Mahāsāṃghika community, after the original schism. The followers of Mahadeva appear to have been the forerunners of the southern Mahāsāṃghika sects, in particular the Caitikas.

• 3. Across Ancient India

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  Magadha was the original center of the Mahāsāṃghika sects. From there, the school established communities at Mathura and Karli, and spread eastward around Vārāṇasī and Pāṭaliputra, where the Kukkuṭikas settled. The Bahuśrutīya subsect took hold in Kośala, Andhra, and Gandhāra. The Lokottaravāda subschool claimed the "Middle Country," the broad Ganges Basin region of northern India, as its own.

  The Caitika branch put down its deepest roots in the Coastal Andhra region, particularly at Amarāvati and Nāgārjunakoṇḍā. The ancient Buddhist sites in the lower Kṛṣṇa Valley, including Jaggayyapeṭa, can be traced to at least the third century BCE. The Caitika branch itself included four distinct sub-groups: the Pūrvaśailas, Aparaśailas, Rājagirikas, and Siddhārthikas. The cave temples at Ajaṇṭā, Ellora, and Karla carry a direct association with the Mahāsāṃghikas. Madhyadeśa, the region traditionally called the "middle land" of the subcontinent, was home to yet another subgroup, the Prajñaptivādins.

• 4. A Transcendent Buddha

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  Vasumitra, a Sarvāstivāda scholar working around the 2nd century CE, compiled a text called the Samayabhedoparacanaćakra. Its title translates as "The Cycle of the Formation of the Schismatic Doctrines." Xuanzang later translated it into Chinese. Of the 48 special theses the text attributes to the Mahāsāṃghikas, fully twenty concern the supramundane nature of the Buddha and bodhisattvas. That proportion tells a story.

  Lokottara, meaning "above the world," was the key term. For the Mahāsāṃghikas, the Buddha's physical body was limitless. His power was limitless. His lifespan was limitless. He never slept, never dreamed, and never needed to pause before answering a question. He was always in samādhi. Every word he spoke, the school held, turned the wheel of the Dharma.

  The Mahāsāṃghika Lokānuvartanā Sūtra took this further still. It claimed that the Buddha was not born through ordinary human union but was magically produced. His feet never touched the ground. He did not truly suffer during six years of ascetic practice before enlightenment. The text framed this as a display staged for the benefit of those around him.

  The Mahāsāṃghikas held that the Buddha's teachings operate on two levels of truth. One is a conventional or relative truth (saṃvṛti); the other is an absolute or ultimate truth (paramārtha). The final meaning of the Dharma, in their reading, lay beyond what words could express. K. Venkata Ramanan credits the tradition with keeping alive the emphasis on the ultimacy of the unconditioned.

  Scholar Guang Xing identifies two aspects of the Buddha in Mahāsāṃghika thought. One is the true Buddha, omniscient and omnipotent. The other is a set of manifested forms through which he guides living beings toward liberation. The historical Gautama was, in this view, merely one such transformation body (nirmāṇakāya). The essential Buddha was identified with the Dharmakāya, the body of the teaching itself. From this reasoning followed another doctrine: that countless buddhas exist simultaneously throughout the ten directions of the universe.

• 5. The Luminous Mind

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  The Mahāvibhāṣa Śāstra, a major Sarvāstivāda text, preserves the Mahāsāṃghika doctrine of self-reflexive awareness (svasaṃvedana) in a memorable analogy. The mind, it says, is like a lamp: it illuminates not only what lies before it but also itself. In this teaching, a moment of consciousness can know its own object and, at the same moment, know itself. The doctrine grew out of the Mahāsāṃghika understanding of the Buddha's enlightenment. In a single moment of mind, the Buddha grasped all things at once.

  Vasumitra cites a passage that the Mahāsāṃghikas drew on to defend a related idea: that the mind's fundamental nature (ćittasvabhāva) is luminous and pure. The passage reads: "The self-nature of the mind is luminous. It is the adventitious impurities that defile it. The self substance of the mind is eternally pure." Defilements, in this view, are not woven into the mind's original fabric. They arrive from outside. Kuiji, who wrote a commentary on Vasumitra, explained: afflictions are not of the mind's original nature. Because they come from outside, they are called adventitious. The Kathāvatthu, a canonical Theravāda text, records a similar thesis among the "Andhakas."

  Nine dharmas, in the Mahāsāṃghika teaching, are unconditioned: not produced by causes and conditions, not subject to arising and passing away. The list begins with two forms of cessation and includes space itself, four meditative spheres, and two features of the path. Among the school's other doctrinal claims is the notion of a root-consciousness (mūlavijñāna). This foundational awareness was said to underlie all sensory perception, as the root of a tree sustains its leaves.

• 6. Texts and Manuscripts

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  Between 148 and 170 CE, a Parthian monk named An Shigao arrived in China. He translated a work describing the robes worn by five major Indian Buddhist schools. The Mahāsāṃghikas, it specified, wore yellow robes. A second text, the Śāriputraparipṛcchā, confirmed this independently. It added one further detail: the lower part of the yellow robe was pulled tightly to the left.

  Dudjom Rinpoche, drawing on Tibetan Buddhist tradition, records that fully ordained Mahāsāṃghika monastics wore robes sewn from a precise number of sections. The minimum was more than seven; the maximum was twenty-three. Sewn onto those robes were two of Buddhism's Eight Auspicious Signs: the endless knot (śrīvatsa) and the conch shell (śaṅkha). The Tibetan historian Buton Rinchen Drub, who lived from 1290 to 1364, recorded that the Mahāsāṃghikas used Prākrit as their canonical language. This set them apart from the Sarvāstivādins, who used Sanskrit.

  The most celebrated text of the Lokottaravāda branch is the Mahāvastu. Its Sanskrit name means "Great Event" or "Great Story." It functions as a preface to the Lokottaravāda Vinaya Piṭaka. It contains numerous Jātaka and Avadāna tales, stories of the past lives of the Buddha and other bodhisattvas. Scholars regard it as a primary source for the Mahāsāṃghika doctrine of the transcendent Buddha.

  The Mahāsāṃghika Vinaya was first brought to China by the monk Faxian, who lived from 337 to 422 CE. He worked with Buddhabhadra to translate it between 416 and 418 CE at the Daochang Monastery in Nanjing, capital of the Eastern Jin Dynasty. The translation ran to 40 fascicles. Faxian noted that in Northern India, Vinaya teachings were typically passed down by oral transmission alone, which made obtaining manuscripts difficult. The Mahāsāṃghika Vinaya was reputed to be "the most correct and complete."

  In the 7th century, the Chinese monk Xuanzang visited a Mahāsāṃghika-Lokottaravāda monastery at Bamyan in Afghanistan. The site has since been rediscovered by archaeologists, who found birch bark and palm-leaf manuscripts from the monastery's collection. These are now held in the Schøyen Collection. Among them are Mahāyāna sūtras including the Diamond Sūtra, as well as texts in the Gāndhārī language written in Kharoṣṭhī script.

• 7. The Mahāyāna Question

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  Paramārtha, a Buddhist monk from Ujjain in Central India, wrote in the 6th century CE about a decisive moment in Mahāsāṃghika history. Two hundred years after the parinirvāṇa of the Buddha, much of the Mahāsāṃghika school had moved north of Rājagṛha. They faced a question: should Mahāyāna teachings be formally incorporated into their Tripiṭaka? They split into three groups. The Kukkuṭika sect refused to accept the Mahāyāna sūtras as the word of the Buddha. The Lokottaravāda and Ekavyāvahārika sects accepted them. Within that group, Paramārtha identifies three different bases for acceptance. Some had personally heard the Buddha teach the Mahāyāna. Others accepted it through reasoned analysis. Still others simply trusted their teachers.

  Yājñavalkya, the founder of the Bahuśrutīya sect, is said in Paramārtha's account to have heard the Buddha's discourses directly. He was in a profound state of samādhi at the moment of the Buddha's parinirvāṇa. Two hundred years later, he emerged from that meditation to find the Mahāsāṃghikas teaching only the surface meaning of the sūtras. He founded the Bahuśrutīya sect to expound the full meaning, which Paramārtha identified as containing the sense of the Mahāyāna.

  Scholars have found more tangible evidence linking the Mahāsāṃghikas to the origins of Mahāyāna. The Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra is one of the oldest Mahāyāna texts. Several scholars associate it with the Caitika subsect of the southern Mahāsāṃghikas in the Āndhra region along the Kṛṣṇa River. Edward Conze estimated that this sūtra originated around 100 BCE. Each of the two great Caitika monasteries near Amarāvati and Dhānyakaṭaka held a copy of it in Prakrit.

  The Tathāgatagarbha doctrine holds that all sentient beings carry within them the seed of Buddhahood. Brian Edward Brown identified the Śrīmālādevī Siṃhanāda Sūtra with the Caitika schools during the Andhra Ikṣvāku dynasty in the 3rd century. Stephen Hodge examined the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra and estimated its compilation between 100 and 220 CE. He placed it in a Mahāsāṃghika environment, likely along the western coastal region of India.

  A. K. Warder has written that it is "clearly" the case that Mahāyāna teachings originally came from the Mahāsāṃghika branch of Buddhism. Anthony Barber and Sree Padma note that major Buddhist thinkers formulated their theories in Āndhra. The list includes Nāgārjuna, Dignāga, Candrakīrti, Āryadeva, and Bhāvaviveka. Atiśa, a central figure in the history of Tibetan Buddhism, was ordained in the Mahāsāṃghika lineage. The Tibetan Emperor Ralpacan had decreed that only the Mūlasarvāstivāda order would be permitted in Tibet, so Atiśa did not ordain anyone there.