From the Academy is a monthly newsletter for Premium subscribers, developed in collaboration with Tricycle’s resident Ho Family Foundation Buddhism Public Scholar. Each issue highlights a scholarly take on a key topic in Buddhist thought and practice, with further readings and videos for exploration. |
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Asked what he considered the most pressing issues in Buddhist studies, Donald S. Lopez Jr. replied with four: the date of the Buddha’s death, the rise of the Mahayana, the origins of Buddhist tantra, and the disappearance of Buddhism in India. He gave a disclaimer that he could settle none. Scholars have been working on these questions for nearly two centuries. The rise of the Mahayana is the most conspicuous of these gaps. Mahayana Buddhists produced most of what the West recognizes as Buddhism, carrying it into East Asia and Tibet. Yet no one can say where it started, when, or with whom. |
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Head of a bodhisattva, Gandhara, c. 4th century CE. A bodhisattva vows to become a buddha in order to liberate all beings, an aspiration that became central to the Mahayana. | Asian Civilisations Museum / Wikimedia Commons |
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Dating the Sutras Based on the earliest surviving Chinese translations, scholars tentatively dated the emergence of the Mahayana to the beginning of the 1st century CE. However, a birch-bark scroll from ancient Gandhara, a perfection of wisdom sutra radiocarbon-dated to around 75 CE, is now the oldest Mahayana manuscript we have, and it’s a copy of an earlier text. That pushed dating back further, possibly into the 1st century BCE, but manuscripts still cannot tell us when a text was composed or whether its authors saw themselves as a distinct school. Mahayana scriptures resist dating in other ways. No sutra carries an author’s name. Multiple versions survive with no identifiable original, so there is no fixed point from which to date the rest. Scholars have often dated sutras early because their content matches what they expect of early Mahayana, then cite this as evidence for that expectation. |
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Reading the Ruins Archaeology yields firmer dates, but not ones that answer the question of origins. A donative inscription from near Mathura, India, records the earliest known image of Amitabha, a prominent Mahayana buddha, dated to the 2nd century CE. A stone inscription from Endere, along the ancient Silk Road, carries the earliest epigraphic use of the term mahayana. That one dates to the 3rd century. Neither tells us much. The Mathura pedestal proves someone commissioned an image of Amitabha, not what they called their tradition. The Endere inscription supplies the word, but from Central Asia, long after the earliest sutras circulated. Inscriptions almost never identify donors as Mahayana until the 5th century. Whatever the Mahayana was in its early centuries, it left very little in the archaeological record. |
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Inscribed pedestal of Amitabha, dated to the 2nd century CE. | Government Museum, Mathura / Wikimedia Commons |
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Who Started It? Scholars initially proposed stupa cults, lay practitioners, and forest ascetics as the first promoters of the Mahayana. Most now trace its beginnings to monastic communities. The Mahayana was never a sect or institutional movement, and had no ordination lineage. It was a claim about who its followers already were: advanced bodhisattvas who had spent countless lives on the path. Those who accepted these teachings originally shared quarters, teachers, and alms with monks who did not. That friendly association did not seem to last. Later scriptures emphasized that the Mahayana, meaning the “great vehicle,” was vastly superior to other paths. The claim drew objections. The dharmabhanakas, or teachers of the Mahayana, who recited these works were sometimes criticized or rejected. Indian Mahayana authors spent nearly a thousand years defending their sutras as the word of the Buddha, which tells us many denied it. |
Building a Genealogy The Mahayana sutras open as all Buddhist scriptures do, with a disciple reporting what he heard the Buddha say. Many place teachings composed centuries later in the Buddha’s mouth at Vulture Peak, a common setting for many sutras. For Mahayana Buddhists, part of constructing a meaningful genealogy was to look back to the tradition’s earliest days, and to see their own teachings as commensurate with those of the Buddha himself.
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