History of Mahayana Buddhism: Sutras, Bodhisattvas, Nagarjuna

The Mahāyāna turn in one paragraph

Between roughly the first century BCE and the second century CE, Indian Buddhists began composing a new kind of scripture. These sūtras, presented as the word of the Buddha, taught that the highest goal was not to become an arhat, freed from rebirth, but to become a fully awakened Buddha for the benefit of all beings: the path of the bodhisattva. They called this the Mahāyāna, the “great vehicle”. Within a few centuries it had produced a new metaphysics of emptiness, a cosmos crowded with Buddhas and bodhisattvas, Pure Lands to be reborn in, and the philosophies of Nāgārjuna and Yogācāra. Consensus

What it did not produce, for a long time, was a separate institution. Mahāyāna monks were ordained under the same Vinaya rules as everyone else and lived in the same monasteries. In Indian inscriptions Mahāyāna is almost invisible until the fourth and fifth centuries.^[1] Where it came from, who first followed it and why are among the most argued questions in Buddhist studies.^[2] Contested

Timeline of the Mahāyāna turn

Where: Gandhāra, Mathurā, Āndhra and the routes north

Mahāyāna has no birthplace that can be pointed to. Its earliest physical traces are in the northwest, but the evidence is shaped by what happened to survive.

Gandhāra and the northwest. The oldest Mahāyāna manuscripts are birch-bark scrolls from the Pakistan–Afghanistan borderlands, written in Gāndhārī (§0, §5). The first translators into Chinese, Lokakṣema among them, came from the Kushan lands, and the Indian originals of their texts seem to have been in Gāndhārī.^[5]​^[13] So the northwest is where Mahāyāna can first be seen. Its dry climate also preserves birch bark, as the humid south does not, so this is partly an accident of preservation. Majority

Mathurā. The great Kushan-period sculpture workshop on the Yamunā produced the one early inscription that names a Mahāyāna Buddha (see Primary sources 3).

Āndhra. The lower Krishna valley, with its great stupas at Amarāvatī and Nāgārjunakoṇḍa, is connected by tradition with Nāgārjuna, and some scholars have argued that Prajñāpāramitā literature began there, perhaps among Mahāsāṃghika monks.^[3]​^[2] The inscriptions of the region, however, record mainstream schools (see Primary sources 6).^[18] The southern-origin case rests mainly on statements in the texts themselves and in later tradition, not on archaeology. Contested

The routes north. Mahāyāna sūtras travelled up the Kushan trade roads into Central Asia and China almost as soon as they were written, which is why Chinese translations are often the earliest evidence for them.^[13] China is where many of these texts found their largest audience (§7).

The evidence ledger for the Mahāyāna turn

What “Mahāyāna” meant

The word names a vehicle, a destination and a way of getting there. To join the Mahāyāna was to take the vow of a bodhisattva: to aim at full Buddhahood, however many lives it took, in order to bring all beings to liberation.

The bodhisattva was not new. The early texts already call the Buddha, before his awakening, a bodhisatta, and the Jātaka stories of his past lives describe a long career of virtue (§2). Several mainstream schools taught a bodhisattva path for the rare person who would become the next Buddha. What changed was that the new sūtras recommended that path to others: to monks, and in principle to laypeople, as the goal they should choose.^[3]​^[15] Consensus

The arhat was demoted. In the older texts the arhat, freed from rebirth, has reached the same liberation as the Buddha; the Buddha is distinguished as the one who found the path and taught it. Mahāyāna sūtras treat the arhat’s liberation as incomplete or provisional, and some call the path to it the hīnayāna, the “inferior vehicle”. That word was always polemical. No school called itself Hīnayāna, and it is not a historical name for Theravāda, which is one surviving lineage of the older schools. Scholars now speak of “mainstream” or “Nikāya” Buddhism instead.^[3]​^[15]​^[29] Consensus

It was a movement within the order, not beside it. Monastic identity in India came from ordination lineage, and ordination came from a Vinaya. There is no Mahāyāna Vinaya. A Mahāyāna monk was ordained as a Dharmaguptaka, a Sarvāstivādin or a member of some other mainstream lineage, and followed its rules. The Chinese still ordain under the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya and the Tibetans under the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya, both mainstream codes. Heinz Bechert drew the conclusion that is now broadly accepted: Mahāyāna was not a schism in the Vinaya sense at all.^[3]​^[24] Majority

Primary sources

1. The oldest Mahāyāna manuscript

The Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā, the Perfection of Wisdom in 8,000 Lines, is widely regarded as one of the oldest Mahāyāna sūtras. A birch-bark manuscript of its first chapter in Gāndhārī, part of the privately held Split collection, was published by Harry Falk and Seishi Karashima in 2012 and radiocarbon dated, with about 81 per cent probability, to 47–147 CE.^[4]​^[5]

Its wording is close to Lokakṣema’s Chinese translation of 179 CE and differs in many details from the later Sanskrit versions: the sūtra kept growing for centuries after this copy was made.^[11]​^[5] A second Gāndhārī scroll, among the Bajaur manuscripts, preserves part of a sūtra about the Buddha Akṣobhya and his eastern paradise Abhirati, dated on palaeographic grounds to the late first or second century CE.^[6]​^[7]

What it proves. Mahāyāna sūtras were being copied in Gandhāra in the first century CE, in the same language and script as mainstream texts, and probably by the same scribes. By then they were already established enough to have their own textual history: the Split manuscript is not a first draft. Mahāyāna is therefore older than the first century CE, but not by an amount anyone can measure. Consensus

2. “That spot of earth will become a shrine”

The Perfection of Wisdom sūtras make an extraordinary claim for themselves. The Vajracchedikā, the Diamond Sūtra, says of any place where even four lines of it are recited or taught:

sa pṛthivīpradeśaś caityabhūto bhavet

“That spot of earth will become a shrine.” (Our translation.)^[26]​^[27]

The Aṣṭasāhasrikā goes further. In its third chapter the Buddha asks whether more merit comes from filling the whole continent with stupas full of relics, or from copying the Perfection of Wisdom, making a book of it and worshipping the book with flowers, incense and banners. The book wins: the relics are worshipped only because the Buddha’s body was produced by the perfection of wisdom.^[30]

What it proves. In 1975 Gregory Schopen argued from these passages that early Mahāyāna was a cult of the book. The relic stupa was the centre of mainstream lay and monastic worship (§4); the new sūtras set up their own physical text as a rival centre, a portable shrine that a small group could carry anywhere.^[27] Schopen himself later qualified parts of the thesis.^[31] David Drewes has argued more sharply that there is no evidence for shrines built around books, that honouring sūtras was common to all Buddhists, and that the Mahāyāna sūtras recommend memorising and reciting themselves more often than writing.^[32]​^[2] The book cult is now seen as one feature of some early Mahāyāna communities at most, rather than the key to the whole movement. The passages remain the clearest evidence that Mahāyāna authors were competing with the relic cult for devotion, and that writing itself had become sacred. Majority

3. Amitābha at Mathurā

In August 1977 a broken sculpture pedestal was recovered at Govindnagar, on the western edge of Mathurā. Only the feet of the figure survive. The inscription on the base dates it to the twenty-sixth year of the great king Huviṣka, and names the image as one of the Buddha Amitābha.^[8]​^[9]

The year is counted in the Kushan era. On the start date most scholars now accept, 127 CE, it falls around 153 CE; Schopen’s original publication, using an older reckoning of the era, gave 104 CE.^[10]​^[9]

What it proves. That Amitābha, the Buddha of the western Pure Land, had a cult in northern India by the mid-second century, the same decades in which Lokakṣema was translating the first sūtra to name him. It also shows how unusual that was. In 1987 Schopen pointed out that this is the only Indian inscription naming a Mahāyāna Buddha before the fifth century, and that Amitābha does not appear again in Indian inscriptions for centuries. A claimed second early reference, on a Gandhāran relief, was shown in 2002 to be a misreading, leaving Govindnagar “the sole undoubted reference to Amitābha in early Indian epigraphy”.^[33] Hundreds of donative inscriptions survive from the same period, and they name Śākyamuni, relics, stupas and the mainstream schools.^[9]​^[1] Majority

When Mahāyāna does become visible, in the fourth and fifth centuries, it does so through a formula. Donors begin to describe themselves as śākyabhikṣu, “Buddhist monk”, and to dedicate their gifts “for the attainment of supreme knowledge by all beings”: the bodhisattva’s aspiration, written into the donation.^[1] L. S. Cousins later questioned whether śākyabhikṣu marks a Mahāyāna monk at all, since the title has close equivalents in non-Mahāyāna sources.^[34] Majority

4. A path for “a few good men”

The Inquiry of Ugra (Ugraparipṛcchā) was translated into Chinese by about 181 CE, which makes it one of the earliest Mahāyāna sūtras that can be dated.^[14] It is a manual for bodhisattvas, both householders and monks.

It does not describe a popular lay religion. The householder bodhisattva is told to keep strict precepts, to see his wife and children as obstacles and to aspire to go forth; the monastic bodhisattva is told that the ideal is to live in the wilderness, practising austerities. Worship at stupas is mentioned only briefly.^[15]

What it proves. In A Few Good Men (2003), Jan Nattier argued from the Ugra that at least one early Mahāyāna community saw the bodhisattva path as a hard, heroic vocation for a small elite of monks, not a democratic opening to the laity. Its picture of the forest as the bodhisattva’s proper home fits the forest-ascetic hypothesis below. Majority on the reading; Contested on how typical it was

5. Skilful means and the one vehicle

The Lotus Sūtra (Saddharmapuṇḍarīka) was translated into Chinese by Dharmarakṣa in 286 CE and, in the version that became standard in East Asia, by Kumārajīva in 406.^[19]​^[35] Its second chapter makes a claim that reorganises all earlier Buddhism: the Buddha taught different paths to different people as skilful means (upāya), but there is in truth only one vehicle (ekayāna), the path to Buddhahood.^[25]

The third chapter illustrates it with a parable. A rich man’s house is on fire and his children, absorbed in play, will not come out. He promises them carts drawn by goats, deer and oxen, which they love. When they run out, he gives each of them something better: a great carriage drawn by white oxen. The three carts are the paths of the disciple, the solitary Buddha and the bodhisattva; the one great carriage is Buddhahood for all.^[25]

What it proves. That Mahāyāna authors had to explain why the Buddha’s earlier teachings, preserved in texts everyone accepted, said something different from their own. The answer, that the old teaching was true but provisional, allowed them to keep the whole older canon while placing it beneath the new sūtras. It also gave later Buddhists a tool for absorbing almost anything, and it became one of the most influential ideas in East Asian Buddhism (§7, §11). Consensus

The Lotus also contains the chapter devoted to the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, who hears the cries of beings and saves those who call his name from fire, drowning, bandits and prison. That chapter circulated separately and became the basis of the cult of Guanyin in China.^[35]​^[36]

6. Nāgārjunakoṇḍa: royal women, stupas and mainstream schools

In the third century CE the Ikṣvāku kings ruled the lower Krishna valley from Vijayapurī, now Nāgārjunakoṇḍa. Royal women, above all Cāṃtisirī, the sister of the king Vāsiṣṭhīputra Cāṃtamūla, paid for the great stupa (mahācaitya) and many of the monasteries around it. Their inscriptions, published by J. Ph. Vogel, record gifts to named schools: the Aparamahāvinaseliyas, the Bahuśrutīyas, the Mahīśāsakas and monks from Sri Lanka described as Theriyas.^[18]​^[37]

What it proves. That the region later tradition links with Nāgārjuna was, in the century after him, a centre of mainstream Buddhism with no Mahāyāna named in its inscriptions. This does not mean there were no Mahāyāna monks there: in a shared monastery a Mahāyāna monk would still be recorded under his ordination lineage. It does mean that Mahāyāna was not what royal patrons were paying for. The inscriptions also show how much of Indian Buddhism’s money came from women. Consensus

7. Nāgārjuna: emptiness is dependent origination

Nāgārjuna (c. 150–250 CE) is the founder of the Madhyamaka, the “middle way” school. Tradition makes him a monk from the south and a correspondent of a Sātavāhana king; Joseph Walser argues that he probably advised the Sātavāhana king Yajñaśrī Sātakarṇi in the later second century.^[17] His his Root Verses on the Middle Way (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā) argue, chapter by chapter, that nothing has svabhāva, independent self-existence. Things exist only in dependence on causes, parts and the concepts used to pick them out. The central verse is 24.18:

yaḥ pratītyasamutpādaḥ śūnyatāṃ tāṃ pracakṣmahe sā prajñaptir upādāya pratipat saiva madhyamā

“Whatever is dependent origination, that we call emptiness. That is a dependent designation; that itself is the middle way.” (Our translation.)^[16]​^[38]

What it proves. That the most radical-sounding Mahāyāna idea, “emptiness” (śūnyatā), was presented as a rereading of the oldest Buddhist doctrine of all, dependent origination (§2). Emptiness is not a void or a hidden absolute; it is the absence of independent existence in things that arise dependently. Nāgārjuna cites the early discourses, not Mahāyāna sūtras, in the Root Verses: the one text he names is the Buddha’s instruction to Kātyāyana on avoiding “it is” and “it is not”.^[39] Some scholars have even questioned whether that work is specifically Mahāyāna. Other works attributed to him, such as the Ratnāvalī, clearly are.^[3]​^[17] Majority

8. Mind only

In the fourth and fifth centuries the brothers Asaṅga and Vasubandhu, from Puruṣapura (Peshawar) according to Paramārtha’s sixth-century Life of Vasubandhu,^[40] became the leading teachers of a second Mahāyāna philosophy, the Yogācāra, “practice of yoga”. Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses (Viṃśatikā) opens with its thesis: everything in the three realms is “mere representation” (vijñaptimātra), like the appearance of hairs to a man with an eye disease.^[21]

What it proves. That Mahāyāna produced not one philosophy but several, often in debate with each other. Yogācāra analysed experience into layers of consciousness, including a store-consciousness (ālayavijñāna) that carries karmic seeds from life to life, and grew out of the meditative traditions its name refers to.^[41] Whether it denies the external world outright or only describes how the world is experienced is still argued over.^[42]​^[43] Contested

The Buddhas, bodhisattvas and Pure Lands

The early texts say that two Buddhas cannot arise in the same world at the same time (§2).^[44] Mahāyāna sūtras fill the universe with Buddhas, each presiding over a world of his own, and with bodhisattvas powerful enough to answer prayers.

• Buddhas in other worlds. Akṣobhya rules the eastern world Abhirati, already in a Gāndhārī sūtra of the first or second century.^[6] Amitābha rules Sukhāvatī, the “land of bliss” in the west. In the Larger Sukhāvatīvyūha, the monk Dharmākara vows, ages ago, that when he becomes a Buddha anyone who sincerely wishes to be born in his land and turns their mind to him even ten times will be reborn there; he becomes Amitābha, so the vow holds.^[28]​^[45] A Pure Land is a place where awakening is easy, not a heaven in the ordinary sense.
• Celestial bodhisattvas. Avalokiteśvara, the bodhisattva of compassion (Primary sources 5), and Mañjuśrī, the bodhisattva of wisdom, who is already a leading figure in Lokakṣema’s translations. Maitreya, the future Buddha, was older and shared with the mainstream schools.^[13]
• The Buddha who never died. The Lotus reveals that Śākyamuni’s lifespan is immeasurable and that his death was a display for those who needed it.^[46] The human teacher of the early texts, who grew old and died at Kusinārā, becomes a manifestation.

This expansion connects Mahāyāna to the devotional religion growing around it in India. The same centuries saw the spread of cult images of Viṣṇu and Śiva, the Bhagavad Gītā’s teaching of devotion and the rise of image worship (Hinduism §7). Buddhists and Brahmanical worshippers were developing the practice of devotion to a saviour figure at the same time and in the same cities. Majority

Buddha-nature. A later group of texts, the Tathāgatagarbha Sūtra, the Śrīmālādevī and the Ratnagotravibhāga, taught that every being contains the “embryo” (garbha) of a Buddha, obscured by defilements like gold fallen in filth or a Buddha image wrapped in rags.^[22]​^[47] Indian critics found the idea uncomfortably close to the ātman the Buddha had denied; the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra raises the objection itself and answers that the teaching is a skilful means.^[48] In the 1980s and 1990s the Japanese “Critical Buddhism” scholars Hakamaya Noriaki and Matsumoto Shirō revived the charge, arguing that Buddha-nature thought is not Buddhist at all.^[49] It had a modest life in India and an enormous one in China, where “Buddha-nature” became a basic assumption of Chan (Zen) and much else (§7). Majority

What is absent in the Mahāyāna turn

• A Mahāyāna Vinaya or ordination. Mahāyāna monks were ordained in mainstream lineages. Majority
• A founder. No person is credited with starting the movement; the sūtras present themselves as the Buddha’s own teaching, preserved by bodhisattvas or by nāgas until people were ready for it. Consensus
• Mahāyāna in early Indian inscriptions. Apart from the Govindnagar pedestal, none before the fourth or fifth century. Majority
• “Hīnayāna” as anyone’s self-description. It is only ever a term of polemic. Consensus
• Tantra. Spells (dhāraṇī) appear in Mahāyāna sūtras, but the ritual systems of tantric Buddhism come later (§8). Consensus
• Zen and mass Pure Land devotion. Both are East Asian developments of Indian materials (§7, §11). Consensus

Debates about Mahāyāna origins

Did Mahāyāna begin among the laity?

For much of the twentieth century the standard answer was yes. In 1963 Akira Hirakawa argued that Mahāyāna arose among lay communities that gathered around stupas, which he took to be lay-run institutions outside monastic control, and that the bodhisattva ideal expressed lay religious aspirations.^[50]

The theory is now largely abandoned. Inscriptions show monks and nuns controlling and funding stupas (§0, §4); the earliest Mahāyāna sūtras that can be dated, such as the Ugra, are written by and for monks and treat household life as an obstacle; and the Perfection of Wisdom texts, far from centring on stupas, set the book above them.^[27]​^[15]​^[51]​^[2] Laypeople were certainly involved in Mahāyāna, as donors and as readers, but the movement’s authors and leaders appear to have been monks. Majority

Did it begin in the forest?

Reginald Ray and Paul Harrison argued that some of the earliest Mahāyāna sūtras come from monks who lived as ascetics in the wilderness, practising meditation and visualisation, and who saw the settled monasteries of the towns as lax. In this reading the bodhisattva path revived the heroic austerity of the Buddha’s own career.^[52]​^[51] The Ugra’s praise of forest life supports it, as does the Rāṣṭrapālaparipṛcchā, studied by Daniel Boucher.^[15]​^[53] Critics point out that other early sūtras are thoroughly urban and monastic, and that wilderness dwelling could be an ideal praised by town monks as easily as a practice.^[2] Contested

Was it a cult of the book?

Schopen’s 1975 argument (Primary sources 2) explains why so many Mahāyāna sūtras praise themselves, and why they arose when writing was spreading in the Buddhist world. It fits the Perfection of Wisdom literature best and the devotional sūtras less well.^[27]​^[32] Contested

Was it a movement of preachers?

David Drewes, reviewing the field in 2010, proposed that early Mahāyāna is best understood as a textual movement centred on preachers of the dharma (dharmabhāṇaka), who memorised, recited and expounded the new sūtras, much as reciters had carried the older texts (§0). Mahāyāna in this view was not a community at all, but a set of texts and the people who taught them, accepted by some monks in otherwise ordinary monasteries. It explains why the movement left almost no institutional trace.^[2] Contested

Did Mahāyāna grow out of one of the old schools?

An older theory derived Mahāyāna from the Mahāsāṃghikas, whose Lokottaravāda branch taught a “supramundane” Buddha in the Mahāvastu (§2, §3).^[54] Ideas certainly passed that way, but Mahāyāna sūtras were transmitted by monks of many lineages, including the Sarvāstivāda and Dharmaguptaka. Most scholars now think Mahāyāna had several origins in several schools and regions, which is one reason no single theory has won.^[3]​^[2] Majority

Was it a schism?

No, in the technical sense. A schism (saṅghabheda) in Buddhist law is a split in the communal performance of monastic acts, and Mahāyāna monks continued to perform them with non-Mahāyāna monks under the same rules (§3). The Chinese pilgrims make this plain. Around 400 CE Faxian describes monasteries that are Mahāyāna, non-Mahāyāna or mixed.^[23] Around 690 Yijing writes that both “adopt one and the same discipline (Vinaya)”, and that “those who worship the Bodhisattvas and read the Mahāyāna Sūtras are called the Mahāyānists (the Great), while those who do not perform these are called the Hīnayānists (the Small).” (Trans. J. Takakusu.)^[24]​^[55] The difference was in devotion and scripture, not in rules or membership. Majority

Further reading

• Paul Williams, Mahāyāna Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations (2nd ed., Routledge, 2009) — the standard introduction.
• Jan Nattier, A Few Good Men: The Bodhisattva Path according to the Inquiry of Ugra (University of Hawai’i Press, 2003).
• David Drewes, “Early Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism I and II,” Religion Compass 4 (2010) — the best short survey of the origins debate.
• Gregory Schopen, Figments and Fragments of Mahāyāna Buddhism in India (University of Hawai’i Press, 2005) — his essays on the book cult and the inscriptions, with later reflections.
• Paul Harrison, “Searching for the Origins of the Mahāyāna: What Are We Looking For?”, The Eastern Buddhist 28 (1995).
• Mark Siderits and Shōryū Katsura, trans., Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way: Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Wisdom, 2013).
• 84000, The White Lotus of the Good Dharma and The Diamond Sūtra — free translations from the Tibetan.