58 The Word of Buddha: Scriptures and Schools
vijiitina) and the ideas and information ( vijiiapti) it processes, there
is nothing.
Mahayana Buddhism as a more or less separate tradition of
Buddhism, with its clearly defined subdivisions and philosoph-
ical schools,. is to some extent the outcome of the history of
Chinese and Tibetan Buddhism. As it evolved in China and
Tibet, Buddhism came to adopt an exclusively Mahayanist out-
look in a way that it never did in India. As Buddhism began to
fade from the Inpian scene in the eleventh and twelfth cen-
turies, the Buddhists of China, Japan, and Korea to the east, and
Tibet and Mongolia to the north, were left as heirs to-the Indian
Mahayanist vision. To the south the Buddhists of Sri Lanka and
South-East Asia became the only surviving representatives of the
perspective of the non-Mahayana. Yet we must remember that
much of what modern Buddhists in Sri Lanka, China, or Tibet
have inherited from the past was held in common by both the
Mahayana and non-Mahayana tradition. And it is with this
common heritage that I am mostly concerned in this book. At
the same time we should not forget that the Buddhists of Sri Lanka,
Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, China, Korea, Japan,
Tibet, and Mongolia have all produced their own distinctive
literatures, and continued to do so right up to the present day.
Having briefly reviewed the development of the Buddha's
teaching in the form of literary texts, I wish to turn in the next
chapter to the actual content of that teaching. In the first place
we shall focus on those basic principles which are presented in
the four Nikaya/Agama collections of the Buddha's discourses
and have been assumed and taken for granted by the subsequent
Buddhist tradition.