Sarvastivada

• 1. Introduction

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  Sarvastivada, the school of Buddhist thought whose very name means "the theory of all that exists," posed one of the most radical questions in the history of philosophy: does the past still exist right now, in this very moment? The Sarvastivadins answered yes. Not only the present, but the past and the future are equally real, equally present as components of existence. This was not a poetic flourish but a technical philosophical claim, and it became the defining doctrine of one of the most influential Buddhist monastic traditions the world has ever seen. From its origins during the reign of the Indian emperor Ashoka in the third century BCE, the school spread across Kashmir, Central Asia, and into China, lasting more than a thousand years. How did a single philosophical proposition about the nature of time hold together an empire-spanning religious movement? And what happened when that proposition began to crack from within?

• 2. Origins and Early Expansion

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  According to K. L. Dhammajoti, the presence of the Sarvastivada school during the reign of Emperor Ashoka, which lasted from around 268 to 232 BCE, is beyond doubt. By the middle of the third century BCE, the school had already developed into a distinct tradition. Its early history, as the scholar Charles Prebish noted, is surrounded by "a great deal of mystery."

  Some accounts trace the Sarvastivadins back to a conservative faction called the Sthavira Nikaya, a group that had split from the reformist Mahasanghika majority at the Second Buddhist Council. According to these accounts, the Sthaviras were expelled from the kingdom of Magadha and moved northwest, where they developed into the Sarvastivadin school. A different tradition, recorded in the Theravadin Dipavamsa, says they coalesced from the older Mahisasaka school, though other texts argue the reverse: that the Mahisasaka branched off from the Sarvastivada.

  One account ties the school's spread directly to Ashoka's missionary program. The origins of the Sarvastivada have been connected to Ashoka's sending of Majjhantika on a mission to Gandhara. The monk Madhyantika is said to have converted the city of Kashmir, which had close ties with Gandhara. A third tradition holds that a community of Sarvastivadin monks was established at Mathura by the patriarch Upagupta, who in the Sarvastivadin reckoning was the fifth patriarch after Mahakasyapa, Ananda, Madhyantika, and Sanakavasin.

  Theravada Buddhists occasionally accused the Sarvastivadins of borrowing from the non-Buddhist Sankhya school of philosophy. The philosopher Asvaghosa, who may have been associated with the Sarvastivada, wrote in his influential work that Alara Kalama, the first of the young Buddha's teachers, followed an archaic form of Sankhya.

• 3. The Kushan Flowering

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  Emperor Kanishka, who ruled the Kushan Empire from around 127 to 150 CE, extended patronage to the Sarvastivada school, and under his support they became one of the dominant sects of Indian Buddhism for centuries. They flourished throughout Northwest India, North India, and Central Asia.

  During the reign of Kanishka II, from around 158 to 176 CE, a Sarvastivada synod convened in Kashmir to address the school's most important Abhidharma text. The Astagrantha of Katyayaniputra, originating in Gandhara, was rewritten and revised into Sanskrit. The revised text was renamed, meaning "Course of Knowledge." The Kashmir Sarvastivadins then declared both this text and its great commentary the new orthodoxy of the school, calling themselves Vaibhashikas.

  Not everyone accepted this shift. "Western masters" from Gandhara and Bactria held views that diverged from the new Kashmiri orthodoxy. Their disagreements surface in later works, including the commentary by the master Samghabhadra from around the fifth century CE, which mounted what may be the most thorough Vaibhashika defense against those criticisms.

  The massive treatise known as the Abhidharma Mahavibhasa Shastra, composed around 200 fascicles in Chinese, grappled with material that had strong affinities to emerging Mahayana doctrines. Etienne Lamotte noted that a Sarvastivada master is known to have stated that the Mahayana were to be found among their own Vaipulya sutras, meaning they defined the Mahayana sutras within their own canon.

• 4. The Doctrine of Three Times

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  A passage attributed to Vasubandhu captures the core Sarvastivada position with precision: "He who affirms the existence of the dharmas of the three time periods - past, present, and future - is held to be a Sarvastivadin." The dharmas in question are not souls or substances but the elementary components of existence and experience, the basic building blocks of what one perceives and undergoes.

  The school justified this claim partly through Buddhist canonical texts themselves. Since the Buddha taught that intentional actions ripen to produce karmic consequences, those consequences must connect to actions that are already past. For a past act to still produce a future fruit, the dharmas involved in that act must continue to exist. Annihilating the past would break the chain of karma itself.

  Within the school, four great Abhidharmikas offered different interpretations of exactly how this "all exists" theory should work: Dharmatrata, Buddhadeva, Vasumitra, and Ghosaka. Their views, preserved in the Mahavibhasa, were generally accepted as long as they did not contradict the core doctrine.

  Beyond the doctrine of three times, the Sarvastivada also taught theories of momentariness and causal simultaneity, along with detailed accounts of conditionality and the spiritual path. The "all exists" principle was called the "axial" teaching, meaning it held the larger movement together when other points were disputed. Only present dharmas, in the Vaibhashika view, possessed "efficacy": the capacity to do something in the world. This distinction let them explain why the present feels different from the past or future, even if all three exist.

• 5. Vasubandhu and Inner Revolt

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  Vasubandhu, born around 350 CE in Purusapura in Gandhara, became the most important figure in the Sautrāntika school, the internal critics of Sarvastivada orthodoxy. His text, composed in the fourth to fifth century CE, is one of the most influential Abhidharma works ever written. Its auto-commentary explicitly defends Sautrāntika positions.

  The Sautrāntika, meaning "those who uphold the sutras," rejected the primacy of the Abhidharma texts that the Vaibhashikas held as authoritative. Early forerunners of this stance, called the Darstantika, had existed within the Sarvastivadin fold as far back as the time of the Mahavibhasa itself; they included monks such as Dharmatrata and Buddhadeva. Eventually the Darstantikas came to repudiate the core Sarvastivada doctrine of "all exists." It was this rejection that defined the Sautrāntika as a distinct school.

  The Sautrāntikas were not anti-intellectual; they authored Abhidharma manuals of their own. The later Buddhist tradition of logic and epistemology, founded by the monks Dignaga and Dharmakīrti, is also associated with them.

  Vasubandhu's critique prompted a response from his contemporary Samghabhadra, described as brilliant, who is said to have spent twelve years composing a commentary meant to refute Vasubandhu and other Sautrāntikas, including Sthavira Śrīlāta and his pupil Rāma. Vasubandhu himself later converted to the Yogacara school of Mahayana Buddhism, a tradition that had itself developed out of Sarvastivada Abhidharma.

• 6. Across the Tarim Basin

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  When the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang visited Kucha in the Tarim Basin in 630 CE, he received the hospitality of Suvarnadeva, son and successor of the non-Mahayana Buddhist king Suvarnapuspa. Xuanzang described Kucha in considerable detail and probably visited the Kizil Caves. Of the religion of the people, he wrote: "There are about one hundred convents in this country, with five thousand and more disciples. These belong to the Little Vehicle of the school of the Sarvastivadas." He noted that their doctrine and rules of discipline were like those of India, and that those who read them used the same original texts.

  By the seventh century, Yijing noted that the Mulasarvastivada had become influential in Indonesia as well. In China, the Sarvastivada Vinaya had been the most common monastic code in the early centuries of Chinese Buddhism, particularly in the Yangzi River area and further south. In Guanzhong, the region around Chang'an, the Mahasanghika Vinaya had been used in earlier times. The existence of multiple Vinaya lineages throughout China was criticized by prominent masters including Yijing himself and Dao'an, who lived from 654 to 717 CE. In the early eighth century, Dao'an gained the support of Emperor Zhongzong of Tang, and an imperial edict required that the entire Chinese Sangha use only the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya for ordination.

  Meanwhile, between 148 and 170 CE, the Parthian monk An Shigao had arrived in China and translated a text describing the colors of monastic robes worn by five major Indian Buddhist sects. In that source, the Sarvastivadins were described as wearing dark red robes. A later translation reversed the colors, attributing dark red to the Dharmaguptakas and black to the Sarvastivada.

• 7. Texts and Lasting Reach

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  A recent discovery in Afghanistan of roughly two-thirds of the Dīrgha Āgama in Sanskrit has given scholars what they describe as "a nearly complete collection of sutras from the Sarvastivada school." The Madhyama Āgama and Samyukta Āgama have long been available in Chinese translation, making the Sarvastivada the only early Buddhist school besides the Theravada for which a roughly complete sutra collection survives.

  The core Sarvastivada Abhidharma consists of seven canonical texts, all preserved in the Chinese Buddhist canon. Two of the most significant were translated by Samghadeva: the Ashtagrantha in 383 CE and another text in 391 CE, though both translations were not completed until 390 CE in Southern China. The great commentary, the Mahavibhasa, runs to 200 fascicles in Chinese and remains a primary resource for scholars of Abhidharma.

  The Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya, whose relationship to the Sarvastivada proper is still debated, survives as the monastic rule in use throughout Indo-Tibetan Buddhism today. In the Tibetan tenets system, the Vaibhashika and Sautrāntika sub-schools are classified as the two Hinayana tenet systems, a categorization that effectively erased the memory of other early Indian schools that never reached Tibet.

  Sarvastivadin meditation teachers also contributed to the Dhyana sutras, a group of early Buddhist meditation texts that were translated into Chinese and proved foundational for Chinese Buddhist meditation methods. The Tibetan historian Buton Rinchen Drub recorded that the Sarvastivadins used Sanskrit, placing them distinctly among the early schools that each wrote in different Indian languages.