The History of Buddhist Thought c24.8

c24.8

Besides the worship of these great beings, there was a theoretical treatment of the stages of the bodhisattva’s career by the various schools of Buddhist education. The earliest is in the *Mahāvastu*, where a list of ten stages is given. Here we meet the same problem as in the case of Sarvāstivāda doctrine, namely, as to whether this can be called a borrowing from Mahāyāna. It does not seem as if there is any one school which can be spoken of as the originator of this doctrine and as the source from which the rest have borrowed it. The conception of a Buddha as a man who strove through numberless births is wider than any school. When the Sarvāstivādins began to teach that anyone through Buddha’s teaching might make the vow to become a Buddha, we have no reason to believe that there was a distinct Mahāyāna school from which they could have borrowed it. The reason why we are asked to consider the doctrine of a bodhisattva’s career a borrowing from Mahāyāna is that the Pāli form of early Buddhism was once taken as a standard and compared with Mahāyāna. Everything not found in it was supposed to be Mahāyāna. But the main line of descent of Buddhist doctrine in India is through the Sarvāstivādins and Mahāsanghikas. They continued their development long after the Theravādins had passed to Ceylon and disappeared from India. In India Sarvāstivādins, Mahāsanghikas, and Mahāyānists remained in contact, living and teaching in the same monasteries. All sorts of borrowings would thus be possible, but we do not know enough of the origin of Mahāyāna to be able to say that the new doctrines started in a Mahāyāna school and then infected the older teaching. It was the making of these doctrines the exclusive teaching that constituted a new school, but still one in which the older teaching could be looked upon as a preliminary stage of the new. The real break comes with the doctrine of the Void, a break so violent that the teaching of two kinds of truth was needed to preserve the formulas of the old religion.