Mahayana sutras

• 1. Introduction

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  The Mahayana sutras are Buddhist texts accepted as the authentic word of the Buddha within Mahayana Buddhist communities. They survive in several hundred Sanskrit manuscripts and in vast translation collections, including the Tibetan Kangyur and the Chinese Tripitaka. A handful of them, such as the Heart Sutra and the Diamond Sutra, are considered fundamental by most modern Mahayana traditions. Yet for centuries, their very right to exist as scripture was contested, debated, and sometimes flatly denied by other Buddhists. How did texts that many believers considered counterfeit end up becoming the backbone of some of the world's most widely practiced forms of Buddhism? And where did they actually come from, if not from the lips of the historical Buddha himself?

• 2. Origins in Dispute

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  Modern scholars of Buddhist studies generally agree that the Mahayana sutras began to be more widely disseminated between the 1st century BCE and the 1st century CE. Before that point, the movement remained quite small. Very few manuscripts have been found from before the fifth century, with the notable exceptions of finds from Bamiyan. The fifth and sixth centuries saw a great increase in their production, when Chinese pilgrims such as Faxian, Yijing, and Xuanzang were traveling to India and describing monasteries where Mahayana and non-Mahayana monks lived side by side.

  Several theories have been proposed to explain how this literature arose. Jean Przyluski first proposed a "lay origins" theory, later defended by Etienne Lamotte and Akira Hirakawa, which held that laypeople were especially important in the development of Mahayana. A second theory placed Mahayana's origins inside the Mahasanghika monastic tradition. A third, the "forest hypothesis" defended by Paul Harrison and Jan Nattier, held that the sutras arose among hardcore wilderness ascetics who were imitating the Buddha and sought an elite path away from city monasteries.

  Gregory Schopen defended the "cult of the book" theory, arguing that Mahayana developed among loosely connected groups of monastics who studied, memorized, copied, and revered particular sutras. Schopen also argued these groups largely rejected stupa worship. According to David Drewes, none of these theories has been satisfactorily proven. Drewes concludes that Mahayana was most likely "primarily a textual movement, focused on the revelation, preaching, and dissemination of Mahayana sutras, that developed within, and never really departed from, traditional Buddhist social and institutional structures."

  One thing scholars agree on is that Mahayana was never a single unified sect. Joseph Walser writes that Mahayana "was probably never unitary, but differed from region to region." Hajime Nakamura observed that the Mahayana scriptures were composed across several centuries in a variety of disparate social and religious environments. This diversity, and the absence of a separate Vinaya (monastic rule), distinguished Mahayana from what one might expect of a distinct religious school. The Chinese monk Yijing, who visited India in the seventh century, described Mahayana monastics living under the same Vinaya as non-Mahayana monks.

• 3. Oral Roots, Written Spread

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  The earliest objectively dated Mahayana texts are ten sutras translated into Chinese by the monk Lokaksema before 186 CE. Lokaksema was a Kushan monk from the kingdom of Gandhara, and he made his first translations in the Eastern Han capital of Luoyang between 178 and 189 CE. Among the texts that scholars consider reliably his are the Astasahasrika Prajnaparamita Sutra and the Pratyutpanna Samadhi Sutra. These translations provide a fixed anchor point in what is otherwise a difficult dating problem: many Mahayana sutras can only be firmly dated to when they were first rendered into another language.

  Some scholars, including Richard Gombrich, have argued that Mahayana sutras arose only after writing became widespread in India, and were always written documents. James Apple and David Drewes have pushed back on this view, drawing attention to the oral character of the early texts. Drewes writes that the sutras advocate "mnemic/oral/aural practices more frequently than they do written ones" and attach higher prestige to memorization than to working with written copies. Mahayana sutras were committed to memory and recited by important monks called Dharma reciters (dharmbhanaka), who were regarded as a living substitute for the speaking presence of the Buddha himself.

  Study of differences among Chinese translations has directly confirmed that these texts were often transmitted orally before being committed to writing. A.K. Warder, taking a more skeptical line, noted that the language and style of every extant Mahayana sutra is more comparable to later Indian texts than to anything that could have circulated during the Buddha's lifetime. He observed that the Tibetan historian Taranatha (1575-1634) proclaimed that after the Buddha taught the sutras, they disappeared from the human world and circulated only among the nagas. In Warder's reading, this amounts to an implicit acknowledgment that these texts did not exist until the 2nd century CE.

• 4. The Question of Authenticity

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  The Theravada tradition of Sri Lanka did not accept the Mahayana sutras as the word of the Buddha. Theravada commentaries of the Mahavihara sub-school referred to these texts, using the term Vedalla or Vetulla, and described them as counterfeit scriptures. The Sammitiya school was also strongly opposed, as noted by the historian Taranatha. Xuanzang recorded that a Sammitiya monk named Prajnagupta composed a treatise arguing directly against the Mahayana.

  The Mahayana sutras themselves contain internal defenses against exactly these charges. Several of them offer narrative explanations for why they appeared so late. One common account held that most people at the time of the Buddha, around 500 BCE, were simply unable to understand the Mahayana teachings, and suitable recipients had not yet appeared. Traditional accounts of the transmission of the Prajnaparamita sutras claim they were originally hidden in the realm of the nagas, serpent-like supernatural beings, and were later retrieved by the philosopher Nagarjuna. Other Mahayana sources say these texts were preserved by bodhisattvas like Manjushri, or revealed through visions and meditative experiences granted by Buddhas in other heavenly worlds. Paul Harrison has noted that the role of dream revelations is treated in particular depth in the Arya-svapna-nirdesa, which lists and interprets 108 dream signs.

  A different defense of authenticity came from the scholar Shantideva, writing in the 8th century. He argued that a teaching qualifies as the word of the Buddha if it is connected with truth, connected with the Dharma, brings about the renunciation of moral taints rather than their increase, and shows the laudable qualities of nirvana rather than those of the cycle of rebirth. On this view, the authority of a text flows from its spiritual efficacy, not from a historical chain of custody. Paul Williams noted that a similar notion appears in the Pali Canon, though the Mahayana interpretation extends it to cover a broader set of teachings. The modern Japanese Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki similarly argued that while these sutras may not have been directly taught by the historical Buddha, their "spirit and central ideas" are those of their founder.

• 5. New Teachings, New Cosmos

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  The Mahayana sutras introduced a range of ideas that had no clear precedent in earlier Buddhist literature. Central among these was a transformed understanding of the bodhisattva. Earlier Buddhist texts also used the term, but Mahayana sutras made it applicable to any person from the moment they generate the intention to become a Buddha, a state known as bodhicitta, and removed the requirement of a living Buddha's confirmation. Some sutras promoted the bodhisattva path as universal; others, like the Ugrapariprchha, restricted it to a small elite of ascetics.

  Mahayana texts also presented Buddhas in a radically different light. Rather than a teacher who, after his death, has completely gone beyond the world, a Buddha in Mahayana is often understood as a transcendent being who continues to live across eons helping all sentient beings. According to Paul Williams, in Mahayana a Buddha is often seen as "a spiritual king, relating to and caring for the world." The Lotus Sutra makes this vivid: it argues that a Buddha's lifespan is incalculably long, and that Shakyamuni's earthly death was a teaching device, an "unreal show" staged so that beings would not grow complacent in their practice.

  The Mahayana cosmos expanded accordingly. Several sutras depict Buddhas and bodhisattvas with no counterpart in earlier texts: the Buddhas Amitabha, Akshobhya, and Vairocana, and the bodhisattvas Maitreya, Manjushri, Ksitigarbha, and Avalokiteshvara. David Drewes summarizes the new elements as including "expanded cosmologies and mythical histories, ideas of purelands and great, celestial Buddhas and bodhisattvas, descriptions of powerful new religious practices, new ideas on the nature of the Buddha, and a range of new philosophical perspectives." Despite the sweep of these innovations, earlier Mahayana sutras like the Ugrapariprchha and the Ajitasena sutra, as Williams notes, show no antagonism toward the hearers or the ideal of arhatship that became characteristic of later texts.

• 6. The Living Sutra

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  Numerous Mahayana sutras teach the veneration of sutras themselves as religious objects, not merely as repositories of instruction. In Indian Mahayana practice, the worship of sutra books and manuscripts became an important tradition, considered to bring wisdom, merit, and protection from harm. The Astasahasrika Prajnaparamita Sutra instructs practitioners to place a copy of the Prajnaparamita on an altar and to pay respect to it with flowers, incense, powders, umbrellas, banners, bells, and rows of burning lamps.

  The Prajnaparamita sutras also claim that their veneration is superior to worshiping stupas or the physical relics of the Buddha, because, as the Astasahasrika states, "the relics of the Tathagata have come forth from this perfection of wisdom." Jacob Kinnard has noted that these sutras present their physical form as being akin both to the Buddha's rupakaya, the physical form to be worshiped, and to his dharmakaya, the embodiment of his teachings. The Astasahasrika makes this identification explicit by quoting a statement to Ananda: "In the same way in which you, Ananda, honor me, who is now the Tathagata...so also, Ananda, this perfection of wisdom is to be always spread, praised, worshipped, venerated, respected, honored, protected, copied, recited, explained, taught, pointed out, advanced, studied, spoken, and elevated."

  This veneration of the physical sutra survives in living traditions. In Nichiren Buddhism, the central practice is chanting the title of the Lotus Sutra, a practice called the Daimoku. In the Huayan tradition, a central practice is the recitation and copying of the Avatamsaka Sutra, often performed in a group setting or on solitary retreat. The demand for printed dharani texts across East Asia drove innovations in block printing. The Great Dharani Sutra of Immaculate and Pure Light, found in Korea, is currently the oldest surviving woodblock print in the world.

• 7. A Library of Traditions

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  The Mahayana sutras are not a single, coherent body of doctrine. They form an enormous and internally varied library, composed across many centuries and probably in multiple regions. Some were likely composed in Central Asia or East Asia rather than in India. The largest modern Chinese canon, the Japanese Taisho Tripitaka, redacted during the 1920s, runs to eighty-five volumes. In the Tibetan Kangyur, Mahayana sutra translations are divided into four divisions, including 23 Prajnaparamita sutras, 49 sutras in the Ratnakuta division, and a general sutra collection of 266 texts.

  Scholars have identified entire genres within this library. The Samadhisutra group focuses on meditative absorption, with titles like the Pratyutpannabuddha Samadhi Sutra and the Samadhiraja Sutra. Visualization sutras promote practices of mentally maintaining an image of a Buddha. Dharani sutras focus on the recitation of powerful incantations in Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit. The word dharani derives from a Sanskrit root meaning "to hold or maintain," and dharanis were understood as carrying magical powers including protection from evil and the generation of merit. By the 7th century, esoteric sutras had reached a new stage of complexity, as seen in the Vairocanabhisambodhisutra, featuring elaborate mandalas, mudras, and fire offerings that would eventually feed into the development of Vajrayana Buddhism.

  Some texts now recognized as likely composed in East Asia were long presented as translations from Indian originals. The Brahma's Net Sutra and the Amitayus Contemplation Sutra are among those now considered by most scholars to be Chinese compositions. The Vajrasamadhi Sutra, traditionally seen as Indian, has been shown by recent scholarship to have been produced in Korea around 685 CE. The Compendium of Training by Shantideva, writing in the 8th century, quotes a total of ninety-seven Mahayana sutras, including twenty-four citations from the Ratnamegha alone, offering a snapshot of which texts were most studied in the Indian Mahayana of his day.