56 The Word of Buddha: Scriptures and Schools
of the Sarvastivada from the perspective of the Sautrantika
school. In English translation the verses along with their com-
mentary fill more than 1,300 pages.^31 The Abhidharmakosa was
translated into Chinese in the sixth century and again in the sev-
enth; later it was also translated into Tibetan. It thereby came
and continues to be one of the great theoretical texts of both east
Asian Buddhism and northern Buddhism.
The Mahayana sutras
In this manner, in the centuries following the Buddha's death,
the various ancient schools of Indian Buddhism began to evolve,
preserving their distinctive recensions of the Siitra and Vinaya
Pitakas, and developing their characteristic understandings
of Abhidharma. Against this background we find, beginning
around the beginning of the Christian era, a rather different kind
of Buddhist literature emerging. Hitherto unknown texts that begin
with the words 'thus I have heard' -the traditional opening of
the discourses of the Buddha~begin to appear. In other words,
these new texts present themselves not as the commentary or
understanding of a particular school of Buddhism, but as actual
siitras. They thus claim the status of 'the word of the Buddha'.
The texts in question are the early siitras of 'the Great
Vehicle' (mahayana). The origins of the Mahayana are complex
(see Chapter 9), but this was not a sectarian literature dissemin-
ated by one of the existing schools nor did it lead to the devel-
opment of a formal division of the Sangha (sarrtgha-bheda),
with an associated Mahayana recension of the Vinaya. Indeed,
the very idea of an exclusively Mahayana Vinaya seems only to
have emerged in eighth/ninth-century Japan with the Tendai monk
SaichO. At the time of the emergence of Mahayana literature
in ancient India, members of the Sangha who were sympathetic
to it followed their interest while remaining within the already
existing schools and ordination lineages of the Sangha, almost
invariably continuing to live alongside monks and nuns who did
not necessarily share their interest. The question of the status
and authority of the new literature was thus initially not decided