Chapter Four　Who Was Driving It: Three Populations, Three Mahāyānas¶

The previous three chapters analyzed the mechanism, the ideal, and the deity. Under the Introduction's rules, the final question cannot be omitted: who was driving them? Volume One has already adjudicated this once through historical evidence: why the lay-origin thesis fell, what the forest-meditator and book-cult theses can and cannot explain, why the dharmabhāṇaka thesis became the main line, and how inscription statistics show that early Mahāyāna involved very few people. That chapter now lists a fifth account, which this volume must record too: the school-affiliation thesis, holding that Mahāyāna emerged from the Mahāsāṃghika line. Proposed in the nineteenth century by Kern, Waddell, and Rhys Davids, it was abandoned in the late twentieth century, not for lack of evidence but because it failed to fit evidence of another kind. Mahāyāna monks received ordination in the various schools; Mahāyāna was not an ordination community and therefore could not be aligned with any single school. More recently, Karashima Seishi revived the thesis on the basis of school differences over Ajita and Maitreya, but the mainstream has not accepted it. Harrison rejects a special relationship between Mahāyāna and the Mahāsāṃghikas in the collection he edited, and Silk names the claim directly in a lengthy review. The inscriptions do not support a single affiliation either. The editor of the Kanaganahalli stupa inscriptions judges that they point to no particular school; a subsequent specialist study further finds at least two monastic communities coexisting at the site, one belonging to the Sāṃmitīya line. This debate has a direct use for the present chapter. The circumstantial evidence below concerning the lack of a unified ordination lineage is precisely the reason Volume One used to reject that thesis. The evidence of inscriptions and coexisting communities is itself the subject matter of this volume.¹ This chapter adopts that verdict directly and inventories the populations anew along this volume's line of external causes.

They resolve into three links and three populations. Producing and spreading the new sutras were the same people: dharmabhāṇakas, preachers whose occupation was reciting and expounding sutras, trained monks within the schools. Volume One, Essay Four, Chapter One, as revised, takes this as its main line, for three reasons. The term dharmabhāṇaka occurs only in Mahāyāna texts and refers to a real human occupation; the future revealers predicted in the sutras are usually identified as dharmabhāṇakas; and the modes of production the texts themselves describe, hearing the Dharma in samādhi, receiving a sutra in a dream, the rediscovery of a hidden Dharma store, meet in the same place as the working picture of a preacher reciting and a recipient writing. Forest meditation was only the ideal of some of these sutras and the situation of some of these people; seeing a Buddha in pratyutpanna samādhi and hearing the Dharma is one source the new sutras name for themselves, not the general identity of their authors. The new sutras established the preacher's role themselves. While the sutras deified the role (the preacher is the Tathāgata's envoy, and supporting him is like supporting a Buddha), they also gave him every support: wherever this sutra is preached, there is a stupa. A text without a guild's backing was produced and spread by these preachers, whose authority the texts themselves conferred.² Sustaining all this was money from stupas, temples, and trade routes: the merit economy of making images, copying sutras, and supporting Dharma preachers. Monastic donors outnumbered lay donors, as inscriptions attest and Volume One has recorded. But traced along the trade routes, the ultimate source of the money was the international trade and urban wealth of the Kuṣāṇa age. Together the three links covered everything from producing new sutras through spreading them to sustaining them: preachers composed and expounded, meditation and dreams supplied revelation, stupas and trade routes paid.

The three boxes distinguish the three links of production, circulation, and support; the first two lie in the hands of the same preachers. The side box, forest meditation, is the ideal of some sutras and the situation of some people, not a separate population. The arrows do not show money flowing only from producers toward donors, and the boxes are not three mutually exclusive populations. “Authority conferred by the texts” refers to authority supplied within the new texts for their Dharma preachers, not a separate licensing office. “Kuṣāṇa money” summarizes the chapter’s account of trade and urban wealth; it does not mean that every donation came directly from a Kuṣāṇa ruler. The prose expressly retains its finding that monastic donors outnumbered lay donors.

The first-century-BCE label concerns the proposed formation window for an early textual core. It is not the date of the surviving Gāndhārī manuscript or Lokakṣema’s Chinese translations. The Gupta label concerns the later epigraphic evidence for Mahāyāna identity. The intervening centuries are the author’s interpretation of the lag between texts and wider adoption, not a newly measured diffusion curve. The seventh-century judgment distinguishes population, intellectual prominence, and transmission abroad. The sources discussed in the prose record personal practices and affiliations as well as monasteries; they do not establish that every monastery converted as a unit. The three links belong to the chapter’s account of multiple small traditions without a single ordination lineage, headquarters, or common charter.

Three populations, three Mahāyānas. For preachers, Mahāyāna meant scriptures and merit; for forest meditators, samādhi and seeing Buddhas; for patrons, stupas, images, and fields of merit. They shared the banners of bodhisattva, prajñā, and Buddha-word, but their inner concerns differed. Volume One concluded that early Mahāyāna was a collection of tiny traditions from multiple sources, gathered under shared names. The consequences become visible here in a history of transformation: a movement separately driven by multiple forces had no center and no charter, and hence nowhere from which it could be restrained. Mahāyāna's later internal divergences—the Prajñāpāramitā line of wisdom, the Pure Land line of faith and vows, and the Yogācāra line of scholarship, whose soteriological consequences Volume Two treated in separate essays—were, from the beginning, extensions of the three concerns.

Volume One supplies another firm fact whose implications for transformation this volume must confront. Drewes's statistics show that before the Guptas, traces of Mahāyāna in inscriptions and donation records were extremely rare. Several hundred years separate the dates of scriptures from the dates of widespread adherence.³ Read through this volume's mechanism, that gap is precisely the ratchet's operating cycle. A new text enters quickly—a pen suffices in the manuscript age—but a new identity becomes the majority slowly. One must wait for the step effect to move the corpus's center of gravity layer by layer, and for a generation or two to read the new sutras as what had always been there. The medium opens the gate, the ratchet lets new sutras in and never out, the population follows: three steps make a complete process. The rise of Mahāyāna was not a sudden outbreak, but a slow accumulation.

The phrase ‘read as what had always been there’ should not pass lightly. Nor is it confined to the ancients. Sociology has given this phenomenon a name: invented tradition. Hobsbawm and his collaborators gave many modern examples. Scotland's clan tartans, ‘handed down for generations,’ were a nineteenth-century commercial invention. The prevailing form of Japan's ‘ancient’ Shinto wedding began with an imperial wedding around nineteen hundred. The Buddhist world has a ready example of its own: Vesak as an international festival acquired its unified form only in nineteen fifty, by resolution of the World Fellowship of Buddhists. Two or three generations suffice to read any novelty as something that has existed since antiquity. Halbwachs's work on collective memory supplies the mechanism: memory reconstructs the past within present frameworks; ‘always’ is a product of the present tense.⁴ For the ratchet, one or two centuries is more than ample. We need not suppose the ancients were more easily fooled than we are; only admit that they were just as forgetful.

There is another body of checkable evidence for the actual degree of acceptance and resistance. Arrange it from weakest to strongest. The weakest layer is in the new sutras themselves. Before the Lotus begins its teaching, five thousand people with overestimation of attainment leave the assembly, and the Buddha says, ‘It is good that they have left.’ The text writes the resistance it encountered into its story. The Mahāprajñāpāramitā Treatise repeatedly raises the challenge ‘Your Mahāyāna is not the Buddha's word’ and answers it point by point. The opponents' slogan survives to this day through citations by Mahāyāna's defenders. A somewhat stronger layer is the persistence of the apologetic genre. From the Mahāprajñāpāramitā Treatise to a dedicated chapter in Asaṅga's Mahāyānasūtrālaṃkāra establishing ‘Mahāyāna is the Buddha's word,’ this apologetics continued for centuries. Without continued resistance, there would be no need for continued defenses. A vivid example survives from the seventh century. The source is Xuanzang's biography; this volume discounts by half the complete victory at the unrestricted assembly of Kanyākubja reported in the same biography, treating it as a victory narrative. This passage, however, is an everyday scene hard to fabricate. Gupta, a veteran scholar encountered on the westward journey, was unrivaled in the science of language and esteemed by the king and the people. He urged Xuanzang not to travel farther: ‘The Mixed Heart, the Kośa, the Vibhāṣā, and all the others are here. Studying them is enough.’ Xuanzang asked whether he had the Yogācāra Treatise. He replied, ‘Why ask about that book of wrong views? True disciples of the Buddha do not study it.’ Xuanzang said of himself, ‘At first I revered him deeply. After hearing these words, I regarded him as dirt,’ and retorted that he was slandering the book of a bodhisattva in his final birth: did he not fear the bottomless pit?⁵ One conversation, each side casting the other out of the true Dharma. Seven centuries on, a mainstream elder still called Mahāyāna's principal treatise a heretical book outright, while a Mahāyāna practitioner answered with hell. In the same monasteries, under the same Vinaya, lived two populations that branded each other's books heretical. This was the actual state of ‘acceptance.’ The strongest layer is numbers. Inscriptions: Schopen's systematic inventory shows that donors identified themselves by school, and ‘Mahāyāna’ as a self-designation reached stone only in the Gupta period. Manuscripts: among the first- and second-century scrolls unearthed in Gandhāra, Mahāyāna texts are a minority in an ocean of mainstream school literature. Censuses: Faxian records, country by country, ‘study of the Great Vehicle,’ ‘study of the Lesser Vehicle,’ and ‘practice of both.’ Xuanzang records the numbers of monasteries and monks and their school affiliations in each country; subsequent tabulations show the mainstream schools, especially the numerous Sāṃmitīyas, still in the majority. Yijing explicitly states that both vehicles are practiced within the four divisions: ‘Those who venerate bodhisattvas and read Mahāyāna sutras are called Great.’ Acceptance is an individual's identity of practice, not a monastery's conversion.⁶ Together, the evidence says this: even in the seventh century, Mahāyāna in India was still a minority. What it held was the pulpit, and transmission abroad.

As the rules require, let this be explicitly marked: what follows is this volume's conjecture. Mahāyāna is one name shared by several movements, not a single movement. The name's unity is a rhetorical achievement, not an organizational fact. Circumstantial evidence: it has no center, no common charter, and no unified ordination lineage, as Volume One established. The concerns of its various lines diverge pairwise: meditators want to see Buddhas, preachers want circulation, donors want fields of merit. Conversely, the enormous scale of later projects of doctrinal classification (Essay Ten) measures the depth of the original tensions. Things needing no reconciliation require no invention of so many frameworks for reconciling them.

The plainer half: every successful great tradition has multiple origins, and multiple origins are normal in Mahāyāna too, hardly a scandal. In distinguishing three populations, this chapter analyzes the mechanism of a success, rather than exposing a fraud. To bring the four questions to a close: what changed was the right to produce scriptures, which was decentralized. The driving forces were media, markets, and three populations. The beneficiaries were those able to write, to preach, and to donate. Who bore the cost? First the term ‘the Buddha's word,’ and then every later new sutra, each of which had to prove its own authenticity. A door that can never be closed again is the permanent condition this revolution left to every century that followed.

New sutras, a new ideal, a new savior, new populations: with all four in place, a parallel Buddhism had formed within the schools. Its direct encounter with the old scholastic traditions would be decided in the arena of debate. The next essay enters that arena to examine the arms race.

A closing addendum: the theoretical cross-section. On the doctrinal side, Mahāyāna filled the three gaps left by the previous essay's addendum. Buddha-body theory answered what the Buddha is: Dharma-, reward-, and response-bodies, the teacher elevated into an ever-present savior. The bodhisattva path supplied the narrative of practice, with three great eons supplying a timetable. Emptiness removed the real existence of all dharmas at the root: no need to fill the gap when the question itself is withdrawn. But the new teaching brought gaps of its own. Prajñāpāramitā proclaimed emptiness without arguing for it; the grammar of negative exposition had not yet been fitted with a skeleton of inference. This vacancy led to Madhyamaka. How consciousness manifests, how karmic seeds continue—these had not yet been explained. This vacancy led to Yogācāra. As for the question left by the quantifier reversal ‘all is the Buddha's word’ (this essay, Chapter One), philology would not take it up for more than a thousand years. Theory's shape in this essay is this: the gaps are filled, and the costs remain in the foundations.

Revision note (October 2026). The first version of this chapter followed the first version of Volume One's framework, assigning the production of the new sutras to forest meditators and their circulation to preachers. After Volume One, Essay Four, Chapter One took the dharmabhāṇaka thesis as its main line, the first and second paragraphs of this chapter and the figure were rewritten accordingly: production and circulation both belong to the preachers, forest meditation is reduced to the ideal of some sutras and the situation of some people, and seeing a Buddha in samādhi is now recorded as one source the new sutras name for themselves. The device of three links and three concerns, the marked conjecture, and the closing of the four questions are unchanged. The reasons and sources are given in the revision note at the end of that chapter of Volume One and in the Chinese-language series 专题系列《谁写了大乘经》 (Who Wrote the Mahāyāna Sūtras).

References¶