Preface¶

This volume should begin candidly with the circumstances that gave rise to it. What this book originally set out to write was in fact a history of Buddhist thought: viewed through greed, hatred, and delusion, how did a teaching devoted to extinguishing the three poisons itself change under their pressure? Once the writing began, however, two unavoidable preliminary projects emerged. Before discussing transformation, the doctrines of the different traditions first had to be explained clearly; this produced Volume I, A History of Buddhist Philosophy. Once that work was done, it became clear that philosophy reached only part of the problem: the traditions truly diverged in their soteriologies. This produced Volume II, A Critique of Buddhist Soteriology. With those two volumes complete, most of the clues needed for a history of Buddhist transformation were already on paper. Volume I supplied chronology and doctrine; Volume II supplied judgments and trajectories. The present volume connects the two and adds the external forces that the first two did not treat systematically: political change, the rise and decline of other religions, exchange between civilizations, war and disaster, and the living conditions and social composition of the Saṅgha. At every hinge of transformation, it then asks a question that the first two volumes deliberately suspended: who took this step, and why?

The nature of that question determines the nature of this volume. Motives leave no archive, and arguments about hidden intentions cannot be empirically proved. This volume will not pretend otherwise. So the warning should be given at the outset: this is the freest of the three volumes, with far more conjecture than the first two, and with the academic reins deliberately loosened. Looser reins do not mean an absence of rules. The rules here are three: whenever a claim is conjectural, mark it explicitly as conjecture; whenever motives are inferred, provide the corroborating evidence on which the inference rests and state how it could be overturned; whenever a plain explanation and an explanation through hidden motives coexist, present the plain one first.

One further methodological confession is needed. The original plan was to conduct an explicit force analysis at every hinge through greed, hatred, and delusion: greed pushes here, hatred pulls there. I later abandoned this for two reasons. First, it was too mechanical. The three poisons can explain everything, and a tool that explains everything explains nothing. That is precisely the criticism Volume II directed at seed theory; this book cannot commit the same error. Second, the method risked becoming a Texas sharpshooter fallacy: fire first, then draw the target around the shot. The three poisons therefore recede into an implicit tool. They determine where this volume looks at each hinge, but no longer serve as the conclusion itself. If readers recognize them between the lines, that is by design. If their names never appear across an entire section, that too is by design.

The organization begins from hinges, not dynasties or schools. Each part treats one major turn or the formation of one tributary: the first fragmentation after the Buddha's death, scholasticization, the rise of Mahāyāna, the formation of the arena of debate, the return of the true and eternal, tantricization, the death of Indian Buddhism, translation into China, reconstruction and survival in China, systematization in Tibet, Japan's revolution of simplification, and the rewriting imposed by modernity. The first two volumes already provide the chronology, so it will not be repeated here. This volume frames one question at a time around each hinge: what changed, what force pushed it, who benefited, and where was the cost recorded?