ABSTRACT
In his recorded utterances, the Buddha repeatedly states that his ideas are not intended to be a darsana or philosophy but a yana or vehicle, a practical method leading to enlightenment. Consistently with this view, and with his refusal to speculate about what lies beyond or behind human experience, the Buddha made no attempt to set out a metaphysical basis for his vehicle for the relief of suffering. However, as Radhakrishnan suggests, it seems that there is in human beings an inbuilt need to speculate about ultimate questions, and for this view the subsequent history of Buddhism provides ample evidence.1 Unable to resist the urge to fill in the deliberate omissions of the Buddha, later generations of Buddhists added their own metaphysics and epistemologies to complete the picture he left, their differences generating the various schools in the history of Buddhism. The major division is that between the Theravada (or Hinayana) on the one hand, and the Mahayana on the other. In turn, each of these major schools itself split into two, divided by philosophical differences to be touched on below. The Theravadins are divided into the Vaibhasikas and the Sautrantikas, and the Mahayanists into the Madhyamikas and the Yogacarins. The ideas of these two latter schools have been of the first importance in the development of the Mahayana, and are used as reference points not only by Indian thinkers, but also many in Tibet, China and Japan. The greatest representative of the Madhyamika is Nagarjuna, and Vasubandhu is a leading figure of the Yogacara school.
