From the point of view of intellectual fractionation and the law of small
numbers, we may regard the Mahayana-Hinayana split as a framework which
brought intellectual life into focus around some four to six significant schools.
The multiple splits within the Sthaviras dried up by around the time Mahayana
appeared. But this regrouped “Hinayana” remained strong; from reports of
Chinese visitors in the 400s and again in the 600s, their monks outnum-
bered the Mahayanists by about three to one (Hirakawa, 1990: 119–123).
Hinayana now boiled down to the Sarvastivadins taking the intellectual lead,
with some dissent from the Sautrantikas, who were however gradually reab-
sorbed into the Sarvastivadins, plus the Theravadins, and, off on the fringe,
the Pudgalavadins, with their soul heresy. On the other side of the first schism,
the Mahasanghikas, for all their proto-Mahayanist tendencies, remained a
large independent sect into the 600s. Mahayana, though it had a number of
theological variants (Pure Land, Vairocana, various quasi-theist cults), had only
two main representatives in the philosophical attention space: Madhyamika,
as developed by Nagarjuna, and Yogacara. The background of multiple organ-
izational fractionation boiled down in the intellectual attention space to a
manageable number of philosophies.Philosophies on the New Mahayana Base
Within the philosophical world strictly speaking, Mahayana doctrine did not
determine a particular stance. Theologies of Boddhisattvas, cosmic Buddhas,
and Pure Lands did not entail a particular epistemology or even a metaphysics.
Mahayana philosophers became distinctive by taking up the slots available for
opposition within the lineup of existing Hinayana philosophies. Sarvastivadins
held a realist and pluralist position, with the Sautrantikas taking a nominalist
slant and stressing the momentariness of all phenomena; the Mahasanghikas,
closer to Mahayana theology, were still pluralists, with their innumerable
Buddhas, but the Andhakas had moved toward idealist monism. The most
successful Mahayana philosophers carved out positions which outflanked their
philosophical opponents’; no doubt they chose only a few of the many posi-
tions that could have been made compatible with Mahayana theology.
Ashvagosha, around 100 c.e., is identified as the first famous individual
philosopher in Buddhism, although it is possible that a somewhat later phi-
losophy was propagated under his name (Dutt, 1962: 277–278; Nakamura,
1980: 232; Raju, 1985: 157). Ashvagosha was the most famous of a Bud-
dhist circle of court poets, and whose epics rivaled the contemporary Ramay-
ana, suggesting the emergence at this time of a cosmopolitan attention space
on which individuals were competing for intellectual reputation. Ashvagosha
looks like a traditional Abhidharma philosopher of the Sarvastivadin type,
accepting the empirical reality of the 5 aggregates, the 12 bases, and the 18220 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths