embedded in mainstream, socially engaged monaster-
ies, all of whom continued pouring out pamphlets es-
pousing their views and values, pamphlets that we now
know as Mahayana sutras. We simply do not know.
The Mahayana and the misrepresentation of
non-Mahayana literature
If, then, the notion of the Mahayana as a lay-inspired
or oriented movement now seems untenable, the no-
tion that it was a reaction to a narrow scholasticism
on the part of monastic, Hnayana, Buddhism should
have seemed silly from the start. Such a view was only
even possible by completely ignoring an enormous
collection of what are almost certainly the most cul-
turally vibrant and influential forms of Buddhist lit-
erature. The representation of Hnayana Buddhism as
narrowly scholastic rests almost entirely on a com-
pletely disproportionate, and undeserved, emphasis
on the ABHIDHARMA. The abhidharmawas almost cer-
tainly important to a narrow circle of monks. But
abhidharmatexts were by no means the only things
that Hnayana monks wrote or read. They also wrote
—especially it seems in what should have been “the
Mahayana period”—an enormous number of stories,
and they continued writing them apparently long af-
ter the early Mahayana sutras were in production.
Some of these stories are specifically called JATAKAand
AVADANAand they have come down to us as separate
collections—the Pali jatakas,for example, which in
bulk alone equals the abhidhamma, and the Sanskrit
AVADANAS ́ATAKA—or embedded in vinayas or monas-
tic codes, as is the case particularly in the enormous
MULASARVASTIVADA-VINAYAwhere such monastic sto-
ries predominate. The amount of space given over to
these stories in this vinaya alone makes the ABHI-
DHARMAKOS ́ABHASYAlook like a minor work.
Given the great amount of monastic energy that
went into the composition, redaction, and transmis-
sion of this literature, and given its great impact on
Indian Buddhist art, especially in what should have
been “the Mahayana period,” it is particularly surpris-
ing that the system or set of religious ideas that it ar-
ticulates and develops has never really been taken
seriously as representative of monastic Buddhism in
India from the first to the fifth century. It contains—
variously expressed and modulated—an uncompli-
cated, if not always consistent, doctrine of KARMA
(ACTION) and merit that supports a wide range of re-
ligious activities easily available to both monks and lay-
men. It takes as a given the possibility of both monks
and laymen interacting with and assisting the dead. It
articulates in almost endless permutations what must
have been a highly successful system of exchange and
reciprocity between laymen and monks. It presents a
very rich and textured conception of the Buddha in
which he appears as almost everything from a power-
ful miracle worker to a compassionate nurse for the
sick, but is also always the means to “salvation” or a
better rebirth. The religious world of Buddhist story
literature in addition offered to both monks and lay-
men easily available objects of worship—relics, stupas,
and images—and, again contrary to the old model, a
fully developed conception and cult of the Buddha-as-
Bodhisattva. The fact that all of this, and a great deal
more that is religiously significant, is delivered in a
simple, straightforward story form that was easily ac-
cessible makes it abundantly clear that a very large part
of Hnayana monastic literature is anything but nar-
rowly scholastic and off-putting. Indeed, in compari-
son with most Mahayana sutra literature it appears to
be positively welcoming, and it seems that the charac-
terization “narrowly scholastic” fits far better with the
Mahayana texts themselves. It is, for example, hard to
imagine anyone but a confirmed scholastic reading the
Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Linesfor plea-
sure, and almost impossible to imagine anyone con-
fusing it—or the vast majority of other Mahayana
sutras—with real literature. And yet, already long ago
the French scholar Sylvain Lévi was able to character-
ize the enormous repository of monastic tales that is
the Mulasarvastivada-vinayaas not only a “master-
piece” of Buddhist literature, but of Sanskrit literature
as a whole. Many of the issues here, however, involve
something more than just literary form or style.The scholasticism of the Mahayana
Both the assertion of the lay orientation of the Ma-
hayana and of an increasingly inaccessible, scholastic
monastic Buddhism, for example, are clearly linked to
another of the early and persistent characterizations of
both: Monastic Hnayana Buddhism was from very
early on said to have been uninvolved in—indeed op-
posed to—ritual and devotion and focused exclusively
on meditative practice and doctrine. The Mahayana,
on the other hand, was somehow supposed to be the
opposite, and to have been particularly marked by de-
votion. But while it is true that certain strands of the
Mahayana in their later and largely extra-Indian
developments came to be cast in increasingly devo-
tional forms, it is by no means clear that this was so
from the beginning, and hard to see how it could ever
have been maintained that the Mahayana in its earlierMAHAYANA