ABSTRACT
Skilful means is not quite so tidy a concept as a systematic investigator might hope. The materials studied above show that it is sometimes of central importance and sometimes rests in a merely secondary niche. However as far as the history of religious ideas is concerned the main meaning must be taken as that which it had in the early Mahayana texts. Even though this was not necessarily always understood by later Buddhists, who may have used the term in a derivative and perhaps misleading way, the fundamental idea can no longer be entirely subtracted from our understanding of any later phase of Buddhism. This view is reinforced by the argument advanced above that the idea in any case had a natural starting point in the very nature of pre-Mahayana Buddhism.
