Encyclopedia of Buddhism Volume One A -L Robert E. Buswell

M AHA YA NA
MAHA YA NA
There are, it seems, very few things that can be said
with certainty about Mahayana Buddhism. It is certain
that the term Mahayana (which means “great or large
vehicle”) was in origin a polemical label used by only
one side—and perhaps the least significant side—of a
protracted, if uneven, Indian debate about what the
real teachings of the Buddha were, that might have begun
just before, or just after, the beginning of the common
era in India. It is, however, not clear how soon
this label was actually used outside of texts to designate
a self-conscious, independent religious movement.
The term does not occur in Indian inscriptions,
for example, until the fifth or sixth century. It is also
certain that Buddhist groups and individuals in China,
Korea, Tibet, and Japan have in the past, as in the very
recent present, identified themselves as Mahayana
Buddhists, even if the polemical or value claim embedded
in that term was only dimly felt, if at all.
But apart from the fact that it can be said with some
certainty that the Buddhism embedded in China, Korea,
Tibet, and Japan is Mahayana Buddhism, it is no
longer clear what else can be said with certainty about
Mahayana Buddhism itself, and especially about its
earlier, and presumably formative, period in India.
While it is true that scholars not so long ago made a
series of confident claims about the Mahayana, it is
equally clear that now almost every one of those claims
is seriously contested, and probably no one now could,
in good faith, confidently present a general characterization
of it. In part, of course, this is because it has
become increasingly clear that Mahayana Buddhism
was never one thing, but rather, it seems, a loosely
bound bundle of many, and—like Walt Whitman—
was large and could contain, in both senses of the term,
contradictions, or at least antipodal elements. But in
part, too, the crumbling of old confidences is a direct
result of the crumbling of old “historical” truisms
about Buddhism in general, and about the Mahayana
in particular. A few examples must suffice.
The old linear model and the date of the “origin”
of the Mahayana
The historical development of Indian Buddhism used
to be presented as simple, straightforward, and suspiciously
linear. It started with the historical Buddha
whose teaching was organized, transmitted, and more
or less developed into what was referred to as early
Buddhism. This Early Buddhism was identified as
HINAYANA (the “small,” or even “inferior vehicle”),
THERAVADA (the teaching of the elders), or simply
“monastic Buddhism” (what to call it remains a problem).
A little before or a little after the beginning of
the common era this early Buddhism was, according
to the model, followed by the Mahayana, which was
seen as a major break or radical transformation. Both
the linear model and the rhetoric used to construct it
left the distinct impression that the appearance of the
Mahayana meant as well the disappearance of Early
Buddhism or Hlnayana, that, in effect, the former replaced
the latter. If the development was in fact linear,
it could, of course, not have been otherwise. Unfortunately,
at least for the model, we now know that this
was not true. The emergence of the Mahayana was a
far more complicated affair than the linear model allowed,
and “Early” Buddhism or Hlnayana or what
some now call—perhaps correctly—mainstream Buddhism,
not only persisted, but prospered, long after the
beginning of the common era.
The most important evidence—in fact the only
evidence—for situating the emergence of the Mahayana
around the beginning of the common era was
not Indian evidence at all, but came from China. Already
by the last quarter of the second century C.E.
there was a small, seemingly idiosyncratic collection of
substantial Mahayana sutras translated into what Erik
Zürcher calls “broken Chinese” by an Indoscythian,
whose Indian name has been reconstructed as
Lokaksema. Although a recent scholar has suggested
that these translations may not have been intended for
a Chinese audience, but rather for a group of returning
Kushan immigrants who were no longer able to
read Indian languages, and although there is no Indian
evidence that this assortment of texts ever formed a
group there, still, the fact that they were available to
some sort of Central Asian or Chinese readership by
the end of the second century must indicate that they
were composed sometime before that. The recent publication
of, unfortunately, very small fragments of a
Kushan manuscript of one of these texts—the
Astasahasrika Prajñaparamita (Perfection of Wisdom in
Eight Thousand Lines)—also points in the same direction.
But the difficult question remains how long before
they were translated into “broken Chinese” had
these texts been composed, and here the only thing that
can be said with some conviction is that, to judge by
their contents, the texts known to Lokaksema cannot
represent the earliest phase or form of Mahayana
thought or literature. They seem to presuppose in fact
a more or less long development of both style and doctrine,
a development that could have easily taken a cen-
492 E NCYCLOPEDIA OF B UDDHISM