goal in one form or another and, however nuanced,
attenuated, or temporally postponed, characterizes
virtually every form of Mahayana Buddhism that we
know. But, again, there is hardly a trace of this aspi-
ration prior to the fifth century anywhere in the large
body of Indian Buddhist inscriptions that have sur-
vived. Even more mediate goals associated with the
Mahayana are nowhere represented. There is, for ex-
ample, not a single instance anywhere in Indian in-
scriptions of a donor aspiring to REBIRTHin a Pure
Land, and this is in startling contrast with what oc-
curs in countries or communities—like LONGMENin
China—where Mahayana Buddhism was actually
practiced and was important.
What is particularly disconcerting here is the dis-
connect between expectation and reality: We know
from Chinese translations that large numbers of Ma-
hayana sutras were being composed in the period be-
tween the beginning of the common era and the fifth
century. These texts were constructing, defining, and
debating competing versions of a, or the, Mahayana,
and articulating Mahayana religious ideas and aspira-
tions. But outside of texts, at least in India, at exactly
the same period, very different—in fact seemingly
older—ideas and aspirations appear to be motivating
actual behavior, and old and established Hnayana
groups appear to be the only ones that are patronized
and supported. In India at least, in an age when Ma-
hayana Buddhas like Amitabha and AKSOBHYAmight
have been expected to dominate, it is, in fact, the old
Buddha S ́akyamuni who everywhere remains the focus
of attention—it is his image, for example, that is eas-
ily and everywhere found.
The Mahayana and the role of the laity
What to make of this disconnect remains, of course, a
major conundrum for any attempt to characterize the
Mahayana or to track its history and development—
much of which might, in fact, have taken place outside
India. But this is by no means the only disconnect that
is encountered in trying to get a handle on the Ma-
hayana. One of the most frequent assertions about the
Mahayana—to cite another example—is that it was a
lay-influenced, or even lay-inspired and dominated,
movement that arose in response to the increasingly
closed, cold, and scholastic character of monastic Bud-
dhism. This, however, now appears to be wrong on all
counts. While it is true that as it developed outside of
India Mahayana Buddhism appears to have taken on
at least the appearance of a more lay-oriented move-
ment, a good deal of this appearance may be based on
a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the estab-
lished monastic Buddhism it was supposed to be re-
acting to. It is, in fact, becoming increasingly clear that
far from being closed or cut off from the lay world,
monastic, Hnayana Buddhism—especially in its In-
dian, Sanskritic forms—was, very much like medieval
Christian monasticism, deeply embedded in and con-
cerned with the lay world, much of its program being
in fact intended and designed to allow laymen and
women and donors the opportunity and means to
make religious merit. This in many ways remains the
function of monastic Buddhism even today in modern
Theravada countries. Ironically, then, if the Mahayana
was reacting to monastic Buddhism at all, it was prob-
ably reacting to what it—or some of its proponents—
took to be too great an accommodation to lay needs
and values on the part of monastic Buddhism, too pro-
nounced a preoccupation with providing an arena for
lay religious practices and all that that involved—
acquiring and maintaining property, constructing in-
stitutions that would survive over time, and so on. The
Mahayana criticism of monastic Hnayana Buddhisms
may have been, in effect, that they had moved too far
away from the radically individualistic and ascetic
ideals that the proponents of the Mahayana favored.
This view is finding increasing support in Mahayana
sutra literature itself.The old characterization of the Mahayana as a lay-
inspired movement was based on a selective reading of
a very tiny sample of extant Mahayana sutra literature,
most of which was not particularly early. As scholars
have moved away from this limited corpus, and have
begun to explore a wider range of such sutras, they
have stumbled on, and have started to open up, a
literature that is often stridently ascetic and heavily en-
gaged in reinventing the forest ideal, an individualis-
tic, antisocial, ascetic ideal that is encapsulated in the
apparently resurrected image of “wandering alone like
a rhinoceros.” This, to be sure, is a very different Ma-
hayana that is emerging. But its exploration is now still
a work in progress. At this point we can only postu-
late that the Mahayana may have had a visible impact
in India only when, in the fifth century, it had become
what it had originally most strongly objected to: a fully
landed, sedentary, lay-oriented monastic institution—
the first mention of the Mahayana in an Indian in-
scription occurs, in fact, in the record of a large grant
of land to a Mahayana monastery. In the meantime the
Mahayana may well have been either a collection of
marginalized ascetic groups living in the forest, or
groups of cantankerous and malcontent conservativesMAHAYANA