Preface¶

This volume must begin with a candid account of how the writing began. The original intention was actually to write a history of Buddhist thought: to look through the lens of greed, hatred, and delusion at how a teaching devoted to extinguishing the three poisons itself changed under their influence. Only once writing began did two unavoidable preliminary tasks emerge. Before discussing these transformations, the doctrines of the different schools themselves had to be explained clearly; hence Volume I, A History of Buddhist Philosophy. Once they had been explained, it became clear that philosophy could reach only part of the problem: the schools' real parting of ways lay in soteriology; hence Volume II, A Critique of Buddhist Soteriology. Once those two volumes were finished, most of the threads of Buddhist transformation were already on the page: Volume I had provided the chronology and doctrines, and Volume II the judgments and trajectories. This volume's task is to connect them and add the external forces the first two did not systematically address: political change, the rise and decline of other religions, exchanges between civilizations, wars, disasters, and portents, and the living conditions and composition of monastic communities. Then, at each juncture of transformation, it asks a question the first two volumes deliberately avoided: who actually took this step, and what moved them to do so?

The nature of this question determines the nature of this volume. Motives leave no archive; judgments of hidden motives cannot be empirically verified, and this volume will not pretend otherwise. This must therefore be clear from the outset: this is the least restrained of the three volumes. It contains far more conjecture than the first two, and the scholarly reins are deliberately loosened. Loosening them does not mean dispensing with rules. Here the rules become three: mark every conjecture explicitly as conjecture; for every judgment of hidden motives, give the circumstantial evidence on which it rests and explain how it could be overturned; wherever a straightforward explanation stands alongside one that imputes hidden motives, present the straightforward explanation first.

There is one more methodological admission. The original plan was to use greed, hatred, and delusion for an explicit analysis of forces at each juncture: greed pushes here, hatred pulls there. This was later abandoned for two reasons. First, it was too mechanical: the three poisons can explain everything, and a tool that can explain everything explains nothing. This is precisely one aspect of Volume II's criticism of the seed theory: it places zero constraints on the experience of practice. The same mistake cannot be made here. Second, it risked the Texas sharpshooter fallacy: shoot the arrows first, then draw the target. The three poisons therefore recede into the role of an implicit tool: they determine where this volume looks at each juncture, but no longer serve as the conclusion itself. If readers recognize them between the lines, that is by design; if they never see them named anywhere in the volume, that too is by design.

The organization starts from junctures, neither from dynasties nor from schools. Each essay treats a major turn or the formation of a tributary: the first split after the Buddha's passing, scholasticization, the rise of Mahāyāna, the formation of an arena of debate, the return of true permanence, the turn toward Esoteric Buddhism, the death of Indian Buddhism, translation on entry into China, reconstruction and survival in China, reorganization in Tibet, Japan's revolution of simplification, and modernity's rewriting. The first two volumes already provide the chronology, which will not be repeated here. This volume frames its scenes around junctures, with one question per section: What changed? What forces drove it? Who benefited? Who bore the cost?