Mahayana

• 1. Introduction

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  Mahayana is the largest branch of Buddhism, and yet for centuries it left almost no trace in the archaeological record. The earliest stone inscription that names it sits on the remains of a Buddha statue in Mathura, dated to around 180 CE, dedicated to the Buddha Amitabha in the 28th year of King Huvishka's reign. Before the fifth century, scholars find barely a handful of manuscripts. Gregory Schopen has called early Indian Mahayana an extremely limited minority movement that attracted no documented popular support for two more centuries. Joseph Walser speaks of its virtual invisibility until the fifth century. So how did something so faint in the ground become the faith of China, Japan, Korea, Tibet and Mongolia? What did its followers actually believe, and why did rival Buddhists insist these teachings were never spoken by the Buddha at all? The answers wind through forest ascetics, a parable about a burning house, and a vision of awakening offered to every living being.

• 2. The Name And Its Riddle

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  Jan Nattier argues that the word Mahayana, the Great Vehicle, began life as an honorary synonym for Bodhisattvayana, the Bodhisattva Vehicle. It was simply a respectful name for the path of those seeking buddhahood for the sake of all sentient beings. Because of this, adopting the term marked no dramatic turning point. The earliest texts, such as the Lotus Sutra, treat Mahayana and Bodhisattvayana as the same thing.

  Seishi Karashima has proposed a twist hidden in the language itself. An earlier Gandhari Prakrit version of the Lotus Sutra may not have used mahayana at all, but the Prakrit word mahajana, in the sense of mahajnana, great knowing. When that ambiguous word was later turned into Sanskrit, it may have shifted into mahayana, perhaps under the pull of the famous Parable of the Burning House, which speaks of three vehicles or carts. The supposed clash between Mahayana and Hinayana can mislead, since the two terms were not even coined in relation to each other in the same era. In Chinese the name became a calque, 大乘, great vehicle, appearing in some of the earliest translations including one of the Lotus Sutra under Emperor Ling of Han.

• 3. Hunting For The Origins

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  The lay origins theory, first proposed by Jean Przyluski and later defended by Etienne Lamotte and Akira Hirakawa, once held that ordinary householders drove the movement. It leaned on texts like the Vimalakirti Sutra, which praises lay figures over monastics. That view has fallen away, since many early Mahayana works promote monasticism and asceticism instead.

  Hendrik Kern, A.K. Warder and Paul Williams have argued that Mahayana grew within the Mahasamghika tradition, possibly along the Krishna River in the Andhra region of southern India. The Mahasamghika idea that the Buddha was supramundane, lokottara, looks like a precursor to later Mahayana views. Figures such as Nagarjuna, Dignaga, Candrakirti, Aryadeva and Bhaviveka have been linked to Andhra. Warder remarked that the sudden appearance of many Mahayana teachers and texts in North India in the second century would seem to require some previous preparation in the South.

  The forest hypothesis, defended by Paul Harrison, Jan Nattier and Reginald Ray, points instead to hard-core ascetics of the forest-dwelling wing of the Buddhist Order, imitating the Buddha's forest living. Nattier's 2003 study A Few Good Men reads the Ugraparipriccha Sutra as the earliest form of Mahayana, presenting the bodhisattva path as a supremely difficult enterprise of elite monastic forest asceticism. Gregory Schopen offered a rival cult of the book theory, imagining loosely connected groups who studied, copied and revered particular sutras at cult shrines. David Drewes has since challenged all of these, noting there is no evidence for book shrines and that Mahayana sutras advocate oral and aural practices more often than written ones. Drewes concludes that Mahayana was primarily a textual movement that never really departed from traditional Buddhist social and institutional structures, and he highlights the dharmabhanakas, the preachers and reciters, who were to be respected, obeyed as a slave serves his lord, and donated to.

• 4. A Minority Among Monasteries

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  Indian Mahayana never had a separate Vinaya or ordination lineage of its own. Every monk or nun who followed it still formally belonged to one of the early Buddhist schools. The Dharmaguptaka nikaya survives in East Asia, and the Mulasarvastivada nikaya in Tibetan Buddhism. Paul Harrison stresses that while monastic Mahayanists belonged to a nikaya, not all members of a nikaya were Mahayanists. Chinese monks who visited India report Mahayana and non-Mahayana monks living side by side in the same monasteries.

  The Indoscythian monk Lokaksema, who came to China from Gandhara in the second century CE, translated some of the earliest known Mahayana texts. Paul Harrison's study of them found they strongly promote monasticism, accept the legitimacy of arhatship, and make no attempt to found a new sect. A Sanskrit fragment in the Schoyen Collection even describes the Kushan emperor Huvishka as having set forth in the Mahayana. Pilgrims like Faxian, who lived from about 337 to 422, Xuanzang, from about 602 to 664, and Yijing, from about 635 to 713, later traveled to India and described monasteries they labeled Mahayana. Even so, Paul Williams notes that fewer than half the monks Xuanzang met on his visit were actually Mahayanists.

• 5. The Golden Age Of Ideas

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  The fifth and sixth centuries were, in Walser's words, a watershed for the production of Mahayana manuscripts. Royal patronage appears at places like the kingdom of Shan shan, at Bamiyan, and at Mathura. Massive monastic university complexes rose to dominate Buddhist learning. Nalanda was established by the fifth-century Gupta emperor Kumaragupta I, and Vikramashila under Dharmapala around 783 to 800 CE. Nalanda became the largest and most influential Buddhist center in India for centuries, and such centers thrived between the 7th and 12th centuries.

  Jan Westerhoff has called the stretch from the start of the first millennium CE up to the 7th century the Golden Age of Indian Buddhist Philosophy. Its schools include Prajnaparamita, Madhyamaka, Yogacara, and Buddha-nature, with the tradition of Dignaga and Dharmakirti arriving last. Major early figures include Nagarjuna, Aryadeva, Asvaghosa, Asanga, Vasubandhu and Dignaga. Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka, the middle theory or Centrism, set out to refute any notion of inherent existence, svabhava, arguing that anything with independent existence could not be dependently originated. Its two truths theory held that things exist conventionally but not ultimately, and that even emptiness is itself empty, a useful concept never to be clung to.

• 6. Buddhas And Bodhisattvas

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  Amitabha, Infinite Light, is one of several Buddhas unique to Mahayana, alongside Akshobhya the Imperturbable, Bhaishajyaguru the Medicine guru, and Vairocana the Illuminator. Mahayana texts depict such Buddhas as transcendental, supramundane beings with great powers and enormous lifetimes. The White Lotus Sutra describes the Buddha's lifespan as immeasurable, claiming he reached buddhahood countless eons ago and has taught through many avatars ever since. Paul Williams describes this Buddha as a spiritual king who relates to and cares for the world, rather than a teacher who has simply gone beyond it.

  The doctrine of the three bodies, trikaya, developed to make sense of this. The bodies of magical transformation, nirmanakayas, and the enjoyment bodies, sambhogakaya, are emanations of the ultimate Dharmakaya, which is reality itself, emptiness or Thusness. Bodhisattvas such as Avalokiteshvara, Manjushri, Tara and Maitreya are objects of devotion across the Mahayana world. They could reach the personal nirvana of the arhats but reject it, remaining in samsara out of compassion. The wish that sets a person on this path is bodhicitta, and Shantideva taught that when great compassion and bodhicitta arise in the heart, an ordinary person becomes a son or daughter of the Buddhas.

• 7. Wisdom, Mind, And Buddha-Nature

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  Prajnaparamita, Transcendent Knowledge or Perfection of Wisdom, supplies some of the earliest and deepest Mahayana teachings. It holds that all phenomena lack svabhava, an essential unchanging core, and so have no fundamentally real existence. The Heart Sutra states that all phenomena are empty, without characteristic, unproduced, unceased, stainless, not stainless, undiminished, unfilled. The Diamond Sutra compares all things to a shooting star, a clouding of the sight, a lamp, an illusion, a drop of dew, a bubble, a dream, a lightning's flash, a thunder cloud. Edward Conze called the patient acceptance of the non-arising of dharmas one of the most distinctive virtues of the Mahayanistic saint.

  Vijnanavada, the doctrine of consciousness, also called mind-only, became the core of the Yogacara school during the Gupta period. Its primary scripture, the Samdhinirmocana Sutra, claims that emptiness theory is not the final teaching and calls its own view the third turning of the dharma wheel. The Indian brothers Asanga and Vasubandhu were its most influential thinkers. The Buddha-nature teaching, Tathagatagarbha, asks what allows beings to become Buddhas at all. The Tathagatagarbha Sutra speaks of a nature within the defilements, eternally unsullied and replete with virtues, while the Lankavatara Sutra insists this is finally empty and not a substantial self. Michael Zimmermann and Shenpen Hookham read these texts differently, as teaching a real and permanent Buddhic Self.

• 8. Defending The Word Of The Buddha

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  The sharpest charge Indian Mahayanists faced was that their teachings had never been spoken by the Buddha but invented by later figures. Some replied that the teachings came late because people had not been ready to hear them, and that divine beings such as Nagas had kept the sutras safe until the time was right. Others held that the teachings were revealed by other Buddhas and bodhisattvas in visions and dreams. The Astasahasrika Prajnaparamita warns that the accusation of inauthenticity comes from Mara, the evil tempter.

  Shantideva, in the eighth century, argued that an inspired utterance counts as the Buddha's word if it is connected with the truth and the Dharma and brings about the renunciation of kleshas rather than their increase. D.T. Suzuki similarly held that even if the sutras were not directly taught by the historical Buddha, their spirit and central ideas derive from him. Suzuki described the range of Mahayana as a vast ocean where all kinds of living beings are allowed to thrive in a most generous manner, almost verging on a chaos. From India, that ocean spread along the Silk Road through translators like Dharmaraksha, Kumarajiva and Dharmaksema, until Mahayana became the dominant form of Buddhism across East Asia, and its tantric form, Vajrayana, took root from Kashmir to the Tibetan plateau and Mongolia.