ABSTRACT
I was once asked by an eminent Oxford philosopher ‘What sort of “animal” is Indian philosophy?’ If we try and clarify what sort of ‘animal’ Mahāyāna Buddhism is we find straight away that contemporary scholarship is beginning to indicate – I think convincingly – that there has in the past been considerable misunderstanding concerning the sort of religious phenomenon we are talking about. Talk has all too often been one of schism and sect; the model one of clearcut doctrinal and behavioural difference, rivalry and antagonism, often one feels, on the model of that between Protestant and Roman Catholic Christianity. This model perhaps has been reinforced by the undoubted antagonism found in some Mahāyāna sūtras towards those who fail to heed the message of the text. These people persistently continue to follow what the Mahāyāna sūtras themselves term – using an intentionally polemical and abusive expression – an ‘Inferior Way’, a Hīnayāna.2 Thus we have texts, the earliest of which might date in something resembling a form we have now from perhaps the second or first century bce, that see themselves as genuinely being the word of the Buddha (or a Buddha) and thus claim a disputed status as sūtras. These texts advocate a vision, although not necessarily all the same vision, which they term Mahāyāna, the ‘Great Way’, or the ‘Way to the Great’, or the ‘Greatest Way’.3 In some cases, perhaps increasing as time passed, this Great Way is contrasted with an Inferior Way (Hīnayāna), and sometimes this contrast is marked by the use of rather immoderate language. Followers of the Inferior Way are, as one Mahāyāna sūtra puts it, ‘like jackals’ (Williams 2009: 23).
