THE RISE AND DEVELOPMENT OF MAHAYANA BUDDHISM 97Asvagho~a's use of literary Sanskrit seems to have been part of a general
trend, for the rise of kavya and the fastidious tastes it engendered had a strong
effect both on Hinayana and on Mahayana schools at this time. Many of the
early schools translated their canons into Sanskrit during this period so that
their doctrines would not seem crude or old-fashioned, whereas the
Mahayanists composed their new Sutras in Sanskrit, many of them with an
eye to the new literary tastes. Several other great Sanskrit Buddhist poets also
come from this era, among them MatJ;ceta, author of what were most proba-
bly the most quietly sophisticated Buddhist hymns in India, and Aryasura, au-
thor of a stylish retelling of a number of the Jataka tales. Aryasura also wrote a
Mahayanist tract on the perfections (Strong EB, sec. 4.4.3); MatJ;ceta's inter-
pretation ofDharmakaya seems to classifY him as a Hinayanist, but he was re-
spected by Buddhists of both courses. A contemporary of Asvagho~a's,
Sangharak~a, composed a Sarvastivadin counterpart to the Buddhacarita that
has survived in Chinese translation.
Sangharak~a, however, was more famous as the teacher of King Kani~ka,
the Ku~a:J?.a emperor who ruled much of northern India during the first and
second centuries c.E. Kani~ka sponsored the so-called Fourth Council, either
at his capital in Gandhara or in Kashmir, to settle doctrinal differences among
the Buddhists in his realm. Given the fact that his monastic advisers were
Sarvastivadins, it is not surprising that Sarvastivadin views held sway. The
Sautrantikas (see Section 3.2.4), finding themselves outnumbered, split off
from the Sarvastivadins soon afterward. The Council's work resulted in the
composition of a number of works, chief among them the Mahiivibhii~ii, or the
Great Options. This book was a commentary on the first book of the
Sarvastivadin Abhidharma, listing the major views presented on controversial
points at the Council and trying to come to a reasoned conclusion on them.
Chief among the points was the question of how to explain the Sarvastivadin
views on being and time. The eventual conclusion is interesting in that it
shows, like Nagarjuna's concept of functioning emptiness, the intellectual in-
fluence of the decimal notation in mathematics that was becoming widespread
at this time: A dharma maintains its own-nature at all times but has different
designations depending on its position in past, present, or future, just as anum-
ber, such as two, maintains its "twoness" even though it is designated differ-
ently depending on whether it is in the units, tens, or hundreds column.
The Mahiivibhii~ii attracted a large number of commentators, called
Vaibha~ikas, who tried to settle points left unsettled by the text. Their contro-
versies culminated in the fourth or fifth century C.E. in the work of one Va-
subandhu, who may or may not have been the same Vasubandhu as Asanga's
brother. This Vasubandhu composed one of the greatest summaries of Bud-
dhist doctrine, the Abhidharmakosa, a gigantic work recasting all the issues of
the Vaibha~ika tradition in as logically consistent a form as possible. He then
wrote a Bhii~ya (autocommentary) on his own work, demolishing it from the
Sautrantika point of view. This commentary was a great turning point in the
Abhidharma enterprise. On the one hand, its attacks were so successful that it,
rather than the Mahiivibhii~ii, became the focus of the ongoing dialogue; on