Indian Buddhism

The first is a reconstruction of the original Buddhism presupposed by the traditions of the different schools known to us. It uses primarily the established methods of textual criticism, drawing out of the oldest extant texts of the different schools their common kernel. This kernel of doctrine is presumably common Buddhism of the period before the great schisms of the fourth and third centuries BC. It may be substantially the Buddhism of the Buddha himself, though this cannot be proved: at any rate it is a Buddhism presupposed by the schools as existing about a hundred years after the Parinirvana of the Buddha, and there is no evidence to suggest that it was formulated by anyone other than the Buddha and his immediate followers.

The second part traces the development of the 'Eighteen Schools' of early Buddhism, showing how they elaborated their doctrines out of the common kernel. Here we can see to what extent the Sthaviravada, or Theravada of the Pali tradition, among others, added to or modified the original doctrine.

The third part describes the Mahayana movement and the Mantrayana, the way of the bodhisattva and the way of ritual. The relationship of the Mahayana to the early schools is traced in detail, with its probable affiliation to one of them, the Purva Saila, as suggested by the consensus of the evidence.

Particular attention is paid in this book to the social teaching of Buddhism, the part which relates to the 'world' rather than to nirvana and which has been generally neglected in modern writings Buddhism.

The materials at our disposal consist firstly and mainly of a large body of ancient texts, though they are unhappily only a small fraction of the great literature of which they once formed a part. Most of the ancient literature of Buddhism and of India generally was obliterated by the Muslims when they swept through Western, Central and Southern Asia with the sword and especially with fire, the greatest disaster being their conquest of the homeland of Buddhism at the beginning of the thirteenth century A.D. All the great Buddhist libraries of India were sought out and incinerated, so that of Indian Buddhist texts in their original languages we have at our disposal only (a) the 'Canon' of one of the many ancient schools, preserved intact in Ceylon, Burma, Cambodia and Siam, (b) an incomplete canon as recognised in the latest phase of Indian Buddhism, together with a selection of ancillary works, preserved in Nepal, and (c) a few scattered texts in Indian languages preserved elsewhere, for instance in Tibet, in Japan, in certain Jaina libraries in western India or buried in vaults in Central Asia. We have also large collections of translations into non-Indian languag- es, primarily Chinese and Tibetan. These are more complete than the original collections now extant, and represent a greater number of ancient schools of Buddhism, but they are still rather limited as being selections only from the original corpus of texts and as representing primarily only those later schools of Buddhism which became permanently established in East Asia.