86 CHAPTER FOURKu~al).a dynasty, whose great monarch Kani~ka (late first or early second cen-
tury c.E.) is renowned in Buddhist sources as a patron of the Dharma (see Sec-
tion 4.4). The Ku~al).a domain had been a Buddhist stronghold since the
second century B.C.E. It included Kashmir and Gandhara, both Sarvastivadin,
and the oasis kingdom of Khotan, a powerful Mahayana center where certain
texts and other aspects of the movement may have originated. The earliest
Mahayana texts came to China from Khotan (see Section 8.1.1). Wherever it
originated, the Mahayana first flourished notably in northwest India, where it
reached the height of its strength in 400 C. E., when the Chinese pilgrim Fa-
hsien passed through.
4.2 THE TEACHING OF EMPTINESS
The early Mahayana texts were intended primarily as therapy for individuals
caught in the Abhidharma mind-set. Their authors seem to have drawn their
inspiration from passages in the Sutra Pitaka listing speculative views as one of
the objects of sustenance for becoming (see Section 1.4.3) and advocating
right view as a means of abandoning such sustenance. These authors undoubt-
edly saw Abhidharma views acting more as sustenance for suffering than as
means for liberation, and so-to avoid simply replacing one system of views
with another-presented their teachings in such a way as to induce the reader
to abandon all infatuation with the system-building mind-set to begin with.
This abandonment, they felt, would leave the reader freed from attachment to
views. The means by which the authors sought to accomplish this therapeutic
task varied somewhat from te.xt to text, but all their approaches centered on
the notion of sunyata (emptiness).
Sunyata is a concept that appears in the Sutra Pitaka but that was generally
ignored by the Abhidharma systematizers. In the Sutra it meant two things:
(1) a mode of perception in which nothing is added to or subtracted from the
actual data perceived, the highest form of sunyata being nirval).a as experi-
enced in the present life (M.121); and (2) the lack of self or anything pertain-
ing to a self in the six senses and their objects (S.XXXV.85). In other words,
sunyata was both a mode of perception and an attribute of the objects per-
ceived. The early Mahayana texts adopted both aspects of the concept but
combined it with changes in the concept of sunya (empty) that had occurred
since the Parinirval).a. In the fourth century B.C.E., the grammarian Pal).ini had
developed the concept of zero (also sunya) to symbolize empty but function-
ing positions in his analysis of Sanskrit grammar (he proposed that every word
was composed of a root and a suffix, so that words without suffixes actually
had the zero suffix). Mathematicians eventually borrowed the concept to sup-
ply an essential principle of the decimal notation we use today: that a place in
a system may be empty (such as the zeros in 10,000) but can still function in
relationship to the rest of the system.
Early Mahayana thinkers combined the linguistic and early Buddhist con-'
cepts of sunya to attack the notion, maintained by the Sthaviravadin and