The History of Buddhist Thought c25.6

c25.6

Perhaps the earliest class of such discourses is a number of sūtras known as *Prajñāpāramitā*, the Perfection of Wisdom. Some of them may be as early as the first century B.C., and we may take them as evidence that at the time when they appeared the new teaching was being systematically promulgated in the schools. The works of Nāgārjuna in the second century A.D. are the earliest written record of the reasoned out system which probably lay behind these sūtras from the beginning. There may be something in Nāgārjuna’s work due to his own genius, but he was not professing to be original. His presentation of the system has made *Śūnyavāda*, the doctrine of the Void, one of the most important philosophical systems of India.