The History of Buddhist Thought c5.7

c5.7

The problem of the later history of Buddhism has also become actual. Philosophically it was no degeneration, but a great advance. This has been brought out by Professor A. B. Keith in his *Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon*. The existence of the documents of the later schools termed Mahāyāna was early made known through the labours of the Hungarian scholar Alexander Csoma de Kőrös, and it was in fact a misfortune that some of these documents were among the earliest to reach investigators in the West. There was then no possibility of placing in their historical order documents separated by half a millennium. But the actual texts are at last being edited and studied, and their relations to the earlier Pāli and Sanskrit works are being established.