Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c19.s1.1

c19.s1.1

Is it possible to deduce the origin and development of the Mahāyāna from factors immanent in the Hinayāna, or must we allow for the introduction of an element of influence of foreign thought on India? There are facts which tell in favour of the latter hypothesis. It is clear that the rise of Mahāyāna was rapid in the first and second centuries A. D., and this was the time when after Greek and Parthian and Çaka princes the Kuṣan dynasty was reigning in India. Matters had greatly changed since the days of the Buddha; foreigners had freely penetrated the country, commerce had grown, and it is not without importance that the most metaphysical of the treatises of early Buddhism the Milindapañha purports to be a dialogue between an Indian sage and a Greek ruler. The most important of all Madhyamaka texts, the foundation in a sense of the Mahāyāna is the Prajñāpāramitā, the book of the perfection of intuition or knowledge, twin sister of the Sophia or the Gnosis of Asiatic Greece. The doctrine of the Trikāya, the three bodies of a Buddha, seems to appear so abruptly as to suggest borrowing from without. Moreover, the sudden activity of the Mahāyāna, its conviction of the necessity of the preaching of salvation, and the doctrine of the duty of man to lay aside the dream of swift release from transmigration for himself, and to choose instead the career of a Buddha to be for the sake of the release of the world from tribulation, suggest the introduction of a new spirit, which India was eager and able to assimilate, but which could not have arisen in such a form unless there had been external influences at work.¹