ABSTRACT
When Buddhism disappeared from India around 1200 Ce, inevitably its Indian literary sources also vanished. What was not directly destroyed during the Muslim pillaging of the monasteries disintegrated in the course of time, since nobody was left who could, or wanted to, copy out the manuscripts. Thus the Buddhist community in Sri Lanka became practically the sole custodian of ancient Indian Buddhist material. Indeed the Chinese and the Tibetans made an enormous effort to translate Indian Buddhist literature, and thus, at least in this form, a very sizeable amount of Indian material was saved. However, these translating activities took place during later periods of Indian Buddhist history and concerned themselves on the whole with the materials prevalent at that time. All this had the following result for the traditional Western perception of Buddhism. From China and Tibet forms of Buddhism were known that appear to differ quite radically from that found in Sri Lanka. Since the latter had preserved archaic Indian material, and also quite naturally presented itself as ‘orthodox’ Buddhism, the types found in China and Tibet tended to be regarded as ‘late’, as transformations and distortions, almost beyond recognition, of an original Buddhism. The ‘Mahāyāna’ or ‘Northern Buddhism’ and the ‘Vajrayāna’ were seen as successively later developments, to contrast with the ‘Theravāda’ or ‘Hīnayāna’ as the original stage. Theism, ritualism, nihilism, magic, obscenity—such have been the labels applied to Northern Buddhism; in themselves, they reveal an interesting diversity of interpretation. Basically for two reasons, such a view of Buddhist history in India now requires drastic reinterpretation.
