ABSTRACT
While Gnosticism as a subject of interest in the history of Christianity has produced raging debates for the past hundred years, the same cannot be said for the appropriation of gnostic concepts to the study of early Indian religions. The words gnostic and gnosis are used to a much greater extent in writings on Mah-uy-una Buddhism than in studies on earlier Buddhism or Hinduism. In later Tantric Buddhism the idea of a gnostic body of the Buddha is developed, one having both cognitive and ontological aspects, and is connected with the idea of sunyata or the absence of any permanent substrate in all things as the defining characteristic of existence. The real "Gnostic" developments in Buddhism emerge in Mah-uy-una texts after the fourth century ce and especially with the development of Tantric Buddhism after the seventh, though such developments are surely implied in earlier texts.
