The Buddhist Religion: A Historical Introduction

THE DEVELOPMENT OF EARLY INDIAN BUDDHISM 55

Although the product oflater centuries (beginning circa 300 B.C.E.), Ab-

hidharma is an important part of the Buddhist canon and played a central role

in the development ofBuddhist thought and sectarianism, which we will ex-

plore further in Sections 3.2 and 4.2.

3.2 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE EARLY

SYSTEMS AND SCHOOLS

As we noted in Chapters 1 and 2, the Buddha's approach to teaching was pri-
marily therapeutic, whereby he used a variety of strategies to induce his lis-
teners to a realization of nirval).a. He mentioned at one point in his career
(S.LVI.31) that the knowledge he gained in his Awakening could be compared
to the leaves of a forest; the teachings he had imparted were as a mere handful
ofleaves. He had chosen to teach only those points that would help lead to
the end of suffering. The rest of his knowledge would not have been useful
for that purpose, which was why he had held it back. Thus it should come as
no surprise that he did not leave behind a philosophical system. Using another
image, he told his listeners that, in effect, they were in a burning house. Rather
than drawing up full plans for the house, he simply marked out the escape
routes. In one ofhis more prominent discourses (M.l), he roundly criticized
monks who tried to form a philosophical system from the categories of his
teaching. What he did leave behind, in addition to the memory of his dis-
courses, was a series of matrka (lists) of the major topics of his teachings, such
as the Wings to Awakening, but these lists were not organized in any system-
atic way.
In the first few centuries after his Parinirval).a, many of the Buddha's fol-
lowers came to view this lack of system as a serious defect. This feeling may
have been due to outside pressures-the need to defend Buddhism from at-
tacks of being inconsistent or inadequate-or to pressures from within the
Sangha itself. Shortly before his Parinirval).a (D.16), the Buddha had told his
followers that if anyone reported having heard that ~ particular teaching was
his, it should be judged not by the authority cited but by its consistency with
what they already knew of his teachings. After the First Council, Buddhists
who had not participated in the council most likely proposed teachings that
they claimed to have heard directly or indirectly from the Buddha, and thus
there was a need for clear guidelines as to what the essential points of the
teaching were.
The first efforts to establish these guidelines were in the form of simple
lists of major topics, attributed to Sariputra and placed in the Long Collec-
tions of the Sutras. These were followed by early Abhidharma texts that orga-
nized the material more systematically, sorting out synonyms and redundancies
in order to present the teachings as a more coherent whole. In the course of
this process, apparent inconsistencies in the Sutras came to light. The question