The History of Buddhist Thought c25.14

c25.14

There are at least twelve sūtras which set forth the doctrine of the Void in this popular form. They belong to a school which expounded it as the Perfection of Wisdom. The best known is the *Aṣṭasāhasrika-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra*.¹ This sūtra is free from the imaginative passages in some of the later works, which often run riot in describing the attendant hosts of gods. This probably indicates an early stage of Mahāyāna, when there was direct imitation of the sober style of the earlier sūtras. Not even bodhisattvas are present. Buddha asks the elder Subhūti to let a thought occur to him so that bodhisattvas may acquire the Perfection of Wisdom. The elder Śāriputra wonders whether Subhūti will do it by applying his own wisdom or through the might of Buddha. Subhūti, knowing his thought, replies that everything that disciples say is done through the virile force of the Tathāgata. “ But (Subhūti continues) when the Lord says ‘ bodhisattva ’, of what object is that the name ? I do not see the object named ‘ bodhisattva ’. Further, I do not see the object named ‘ Perfection of Wisdom ’ . . . What bodhisattva and in what Perfection of Wisdom shall I exhort and instruct ? But further, if at my speaking and teaching the mind of a bodhisattva does not sink, if he is not terrified [at the doctrine now set forth] even so is he to be instructed in the Perfection of Wisdom . . . The bodhisattva who is practising the Perfection of Wisdom must so learn that in learning he forms no imagination through the thought of enlightenment. And why ? Because his thought is non-thought. The nature of his thought is pure (i.e. free from any sense-element).”