(1) Mahāyāna is not a religion, church, or sect. In India it had no independent institutional existence. It was dependent on the monasteries and nunneries of the eighteen schools. (2) Mahāyāna is not an ordination lineage (nikāya). Monks and nuns who follow Mahāyāna ordain in the lineages of the eighteen Vinaya schools. The great fourth- century philosopher Asa􏵻ga was a Sarvāstivādin. The sixth-century Abhisamaya- āla􏵺kāra master Vimuktisena was a Sā􏵺mitīya. Dīpa􏵺karaśrījñāna (Atiśa), the tenth to eleventh-century monk from Bengal who travelled to Tibet where his teaching has an enormous impact, ordained as a Mahāsā􏵺ghika but lived amidst Sarvāstivāda monks in Tibet. On his travels in India in the seventh century the Tang pilgrim Hsüan-tsang described the inhabitants of several of the monasteries that he visited as ‘Mahāyāna-Sthavira’.15 (3) Mahāyāna is not a monolith. The canopy of Mahāyāna shelters a wide range of divergent philosophical positions. Mahāyāna has no single voice, no single posi- tion. It is a seminar, a series of conversations, and not a choir. (4) Mahāyāna had no geographical centre. (5) There is no special or inherent connection between the use of Sanskrit and the Mahāyāna. The eighteen schools used several languages: Prakrits including Pāli and Gāndhārī, Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, Buddhist Sanskrit, and classical San- skrit. The Mahāyāna used Gāndhārī, Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, Buddhist San- skrit, and classical Sanskrit. (6) Mahāyāna does not reject the Śrāvaka texts or practices. It accepts them in their entirety. The study of the Śrāvaka Pi􏵼akas was essential to the Mahāyāna masters, and the great Mahāyāna sūtras cannot be understood without a thorough ground- ing in the Śrāvaka Pi􏵼akas. (7) Mahāyāna is not morally lax, or a concession to lay needs. On the contrary, many of its sūtras advocate a rigourous morality, often a strict ascetic life in the forest, and sharply criticize settled and corrupt monks, as for example the Rā􏵾􏵼ra- pālaparip􏶁cchā. It is going too far, however, to describe the Mahāyāna as a whole as a forest-based reform movement (this seems to be the current fashion). We should never lose sight of its diversity. The Śrāvaka schools and the exponents of Mahāyāna were all obliged to address the needs of both lay-people and monastics.16 To reduce institutional or religious history to a lay/monastic dichotomy is, to put it mildly, a gross oversim- plification. Analysis in terms of pressure-groups is more fruitful. Buddhist institu- tions did not exist in isolation, or address themselves only to ‘Buddhists’, to lay- followers, or to their own monastic members. They interacted with a complex of social groups—rulers, courtiers, merchants, traders, farmers, brahmans, pravrajitas, Jainas, and so on—and had to respond to the changing problems, needs, pressures of society. (8) Mahāyāna is not necessarily ‘late’. The earliest bodhisattva sūtras were probably composed in the second or first century BCE, and only later were appropriated under the emergent Mahāyāna.17 Some Mahāyāna sūtras, already quite developed, were transmitted to Central Asia and then translated into Chinese by the second half of the second century CE. The early Mahāyāna masters—Maitreya, Nāgārjuna, Asa􏵻ga, and Vasubandhu, for example—were earlier than the great fifth-century scholar Buddhaghosa, who codified the Mahāvihārin system as we know it today—as an Abhidharma school asserting inter alia a bounded dharma-theory within a theory of momentariness (k􏵾a􏵽ikavāda). The early scholars of the Sarvāstivāda-Vaibhā􏵾ika and other schools also preceded Buddhaghosa. Kumārajīva’s massive Mahāprajñāpāramitā Śāstra, which attests to the devel- oped state of Mahāyāna exegesis and its intimate relation to Śrāvaka thought in the second half of the fourth century, is earlier than Buddhaghosa’s magnum opus, the Visuddhimagga. (9) There is no inherent connection between Mahāyāna and the cult of relics, stūpas, or Buddha images. These cults are shared by all schools and most movements. The fundamental importance of cults to the identity of the Mahāvihāra Theravāda is seen in its literature: Mahāva􏵺sa for cults in general, Thūpava􏵺sa for stūpas, Dā􏵼hava􏵺sa (Dantadhātuva􏵽􏵽anā) for the Tooth-relic, Nalā􏵼adhātuva􏵺sa for the forehead-bone relic, and Mahābodhiva􏵺sa for Bodhi-trees. All of these works, preserved in Pāli, are unique to the Theravāda. (10) Mahāyāna is not a school or style of art.

• published: 13 Mar 2015
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