supra-mundane and trans-historical Buddhas, so that new sutras were attrib-
uted not to the Shakyamuni Buddha of the Elders but to inspiration from some
prior or current Buddha. The reincarnation doctrine must have been given a
boost at this time by its added usefulness in legitimating Mahayana and
its practitioners. Popular Mahayana gave rise to a variety of new religious
paths: beliefs in rebirth in a Pure Land, a paradise presided over by one of the
future Buddhas; worship of Vairocana Buddha, an all-pervasive cosmic God;
prayers to merciful and world-intervening Bodhisattvas. These innovations
added many alternatives to monastic meditation, especially lay rituals, as well
as promoting rather naive theistic beliefs that undercut the philosophical path
of detachment from a cosmos of illusory permanences.
There was no sharp or prolonged split between lay-oriented Buddhism and
the monastic life. It appears that the phase of enthusiastic Mahayanist lay
movements did not last long in India. Mahayana had no vinaya disciplinary
rules of its own, and became not so much a development of separate monas-
teries as a movement within existing monasteries (Dutt, 1962: 176; Hirakawa,
1990: 308–311). The Bodhisattva path did not negate what came to be called
the Pratyekabuddha (“private Buddha”) path, but added another level of
religious status beyond it. When Mahayana first crystallized, there was a phase
of hostility to “Hinayana”; the Lotus sutra (compiled in the first two centuries
of the Common Era) derided early Buddhism as the “lesser path” and its
teachings as provisional expressions for an unsophisticated audience. About
the same time the Vimalkirti sutra depicted a layman achieving an enlighten-
ment superior to that of the monks. Nevertheless, in the centuries that fol-
lowed, we find Mahayana monks in the same monasteries as Hinayana; this
mixing was facilitated by the shift toward central monastic centers or “univer-
sities,” the mahavihara (“great monastery”) complexes where all the various
sects resided and taught. Stupa worship decayed; Mahayana became a move-
ment again largely consisting of monks.
Such sequences repeat many times in Indian religious history. Monastic
organizations generate a new focus for social charisma, which becomes mo-
nopolized by full-time specialists, leading to emulation by lay movements. In
turn the latter, when successful, develop a professionalized elite who become
monastic specialists in their own right. We see this in the development of lay
Mahayana from monastic Buddhism and its reabsorption into monasticism; in
the borrowing of Buddhist and Jaina doctrines and meditation practices by lay
Hindus, eventually culminating in the Advaita monks founded by Shankara;
and again in the dialectic between Vaishnava orders and the popular bhakti
movements which spin off from them. The continuous expansion of the market
for religious charisma cycles through institutionalized and deinstitutionalized
forms.
External and Internal Politics: India • 219