record: If adherents of the Mahayana had in fact
heeded the injunctions in their own texts, and turned
away from cult and giving, they would have left few
if any traces outside their large “pamphlet” or “tract”
literature. But any success within Mahayana groups
would also have to be set alongside the apparent fail-
ure to affect the mainstream Indian Buddhist tradi-
tion for a very long time: That tradition not only
continued, but increased its construction and pro-
motion of monastic cult sites and objects of devotion,
and became increasingly entangled in religious gifts—
land, cash endowments, and business enterprises. All
our sources for the first five centuries make this clear.
So too, it seems, did the Mahayana: When in the late
fifth and early sixth centuries we finally get the first
references to the Mahayana by name, it is, again, in
association with large grants of land. There are still
other possible indications that the Mahayana “re-
form” was not entirely successful even among its
own ranks: A Mahayana text like, for example, the
Samadhiraja-sutra (King of Concentrations Sutra) is
still spending a great deal of space asserting the pri-
macy of practice over worship, of realization over re-
ligious giving, and still fulminating against the
accumulation of donations—preaching to the sup-
posedly converted is probably never a good sign. It is
also important to note that such assertions are not
necessarily unique to the Mahayana. They occur spo-
radically (already?) in some Hnayana sources, both
sutra and vinaya, and are found even in works like
Aryas ́ura’s JATAKAMALA. Such assertions may prove
to be only an old Buddhist issue that the Mahayana
revived.
The Mahayana and the new bodhisattvas
There is left, lastly, the one element that is associated
with the Mahayana and that appears, perhaps more
than anything else, to have had a major and lasting im-
pact on Indian religious life and culture. It has already
been noted that what evidence we have seems to sug-
gest that the new Mahayana buddhas—Amitabha, and
even less so Aksobhya and Bhaisajyaguru—may never
have really taken root in India, and the same would
seem to hold for an almost endless list of Mahayana
bodhisattvas or “aspirants to awakening.” But two of
these latter, starting from the fifth century, clearly
caught on: the Bodhisattva Mañjus ́r and the Bo-
dhisattva Avalokites ́vara, especially the latter. The first
of these, the Bodhisattva Mañjus ́r, is certainly the ear-
lier of the two. He, an exemplification of the new wis-
dom and emphasis on doctrine, occurs in some of the
Mahayana sutras that can be dated early, but never re-
ally as anything other than a model or ideal, and cer-
tainly not as an object of cult or devotion. It is only
much, much later, when his character has changed,
that cult images of Mañjus ́roccur, and even then—
after the fifth century—they are not particularly
numerous. It is quite otherwise with Avalokites ́vara.
He comes later—perhaps considerably later—than
Mañjus ́r, but already in the earliest textual references
to him of any detail (probably in a late chapter of the
LOTUS SUTRA[SADDHARMAPUNDARIKA-SUTRA]), and
the earliest undisputed art historical representations of
him (probably some Gupta images from Sarnath and
some reliefs from the western cave monasteries), he ap-
pears as a “savior” figure, and he continues in this role,
sometimes jostling with Tara, a female competitor, un-
til the “disappearance” of Buddhism from India.The bodhisattva concept reflected in the late forms
of Mañjus ́rand Avalokites ́vara is certainly important,
but it remains unclear whether it is best seen as an or-
ganic development of specifically Mahayana ideas, or,
rather, as a part of much larger developments that were
occurring in Indian religion as a whole. What seems
fairly sure, however, is that there was an earlier and
much more prosaic—though none the less heroic—
Mahayana conception of the bodhisattva as well. Sim-
ply put, this amounted to ordinary monks, nuns, and
perhaps very committed laypersons taking a vow to
replicate the career of S ́akyamuni in all its immensity,
committing themselves to, in effect, a long, if not end-
less, series of lifetimes spent in working for the bene-
fit of others, of postponing their release and full
enlightenment for the benefit of all. This ideal has had,
of course, strong appeal in the modern West, but it
also may account, at least in part, for the failure of the
early Mahayana in India. At the least it asked too
much—think what it would cost an individual just to
become Saint Francis; at the worst such an ideal might
well have appeared to religious women and men in In-
dia as counterintuitive, if not positively silly. What we
know of such committed men and women would sug-
gest that they were sternly conditioned to flee the very
thing, the long cycle of rebirth, that they were being
asked to embrace. In the end, however—and that is
where we are—this may simply be yet another thing
we do not really know about the Mahayana.See also:Madhyamaka School; Mainstream Buddhist
Schools; Merit and Merit-Making; Prajñaparamita
Literature; Relics and Relics Cults; Yogacara SchoolMAHAYANA