Introduction

This book addresses two separate but related problems in Buddhist studies. The first concerns the genealogy of what comes to be known as the “Great Vehicle,” or Mahāyāna Buddhism, the Buddhism comprising many of the traditions found in China, Korea, Vietnam and Japan including Zen, Pure Land and Tantric forms of Buddhism. The second problem concerns the political and social history of the two ideas associated with the name Mahāyāna. The first is that everything is to be characterized as “emptiness” (śūnyatā). The second, which is alternately presented as a corollary of the first, as an independent thesis or as the antithesis of the first, is that mind is the ultimate temporal and ontological source of all that we perceive. The mind-centered thesis is sometimes assumed to come later than the doctrine of emptiness and is referred to as the doctrine of “mind-only” (or “vijñāpti-mātra” – the alternate name for the Yogācāra School).