98 CHAPTER FOURthe other hand, it was such an elegant and thorough summary of Abhidharma
analysis that it formed the basis for Yogacara Abhidharma studies for centuries
afterward. It has even survived to the present as a cornerstone of the Tibetan
monastic curriculum (see Section 11.3.3). Mahayana tradition identifies the
author of this work as Asanga's brother and states that Asanga converted him
to Yogacara beliefs soon after the work was completed. Modern scholarship
has called this point into question, but the conversion of the Abhidharmakosa
and its commentary to the Yogacara cause cannot be denied. Dignaga-the
foremost pupil of the author of the Abhidharmakosa-seems to have remained
a Sautrantikan, and he definitely contributed to another enterprise at which
Hinayana continued to excel: formal logic and epistemology. In fact, Dignaga's
writings revolutionized these subjects and had a long-term effect on philo-
sophical debate in all major Indian traditions for centuries afterward (see Sec-
tion 6.2).
By and large, Hinayanists ignored the Mahayana polemics except to point
out that the Mahayana Sutras were obviously not the teachings of the histori-
cal Buddha and that the doctrine of emptiness undercut the truth value of the
Path. The Hinayana term for the Mahayanists was Vt:iitulika, which means ei-
ther Expansionists or Illusionists, referring either to the expanded Mahayana
Sutras or to the Mahayana teachings on the interpenetration of reality and il-
lusion. One branch of the Sarvastivadins, the MUlasarvastivadins, recast their
canon in a literary form similar to the great Mahayana Sutras, but it is impos-
sible to tell whether they did this in response to the Mahayana movement or
simply to keep up with the literary tastes of the period in general.
The willingness ofboth the Hinayana and Mahayana schools to translate
the teaching into Sanskrit and to keep abreast of other intellectual trends dur-
ing this period was obviously an effort to keep the Buddha's message modern
and competitive, not only among themselves but also with regard to Hinduism
and other religions that were also adapting to those trends. However, this will-
ingness to adapt ultimately provoked a small backlash in later centuries, in that
some monks felt that the original teachings had been adulterated and lost.
This feeling led them to search out pre-Sanskrit copies of the canon, a quest
that in the fifth century C.E. led the south Indian monk Buddhaghosa to Sri
Lanka, There he found not only what was apparently an old recension of the
Pali Canon, but also the archaic Sinhalese commentaries, which he was led to
believe were coeval with the canon. These he translated into Pali, at the same
time writing a great summary of the Theravadin position (see Section 7 .2).
Thus began a renaissance in Theravadin studies that, in a circuitous way, led to
Theravada being the only Hinayana school to survive the demise ofBuddhism
in India relatively intact (see Section 7.3).