4 Introductionmean that those ideas fail to affect our view of the world. The
principles of, say, Newtonian physics, Darwinian evolutionary
theory, and Freudian psychology contribute to a world-viewthat
is shared by many who have never read a word of what Newton,
Darwin, or Freud wrote and would be hard pressed to explain
in detail any of their ideas.
I should, however, add that I have not entirely eschewed the
general-survey approach; Chapter 9, on specifically Mahayana
ideas, and especially Chapter IO, an overview of the history of
the different traditions of Buddhism in Asia, are intended to give
some indication of what I have not covered and provide some
form of orientation for further study.
Apart from its simply allowing a more sustained account of
some significant aspects of Buddhist thought and practice, there
is a further reason why I think focusing on the common heritage
as indicated above is appropriate at the introductory level: it affords
a perspective on the development of Buddhist thought and prac-
tice which calls into question what might be dubbed the standard
'textbook' view and is in fact more in tune with recent scholar-
ship. This textbook view tends to see the history of Buddhism in
terms of a division into two major 'sects': the Theravada and the
Mahayana. More specifically, according to this 'textbook' view,
in origin the Mahayana was at once a popular religious protest
against the elitist monasticism of early Buddhism and a philo-
sophical refutation of its dead-end scholasticism; moreover,this
religious protest and philosophical refutation rapidly all but
marginalized earlier forms of Buddhism. The research published
in the last twenty years or so has increasingly made such a
view of the development of Indian Buddhist thought and prac-
tice untenable. The Mahayana did not originate as a clearly
defined 'sect' and, far from being a popular lay movement, it seems
increasingly likely that.it began as a minority monastic move-
ment and remained such for several hundred years, down to at
least the fifth century CE. Moreover, what is becoming clearer is
that many elements of Buddhist thought and practice that were
once thought to be characteristic of the emerging Mahayana
were simply developments within what has been called by some