ABSTRACT
As far as we can tell at the moment, the earliest specifically Mahāyāna literature consists of sūtras of the Prajñāpāramitā-type. Since these are Mahāyāna sūtras they thus claim a disputed status as the word of the Buddha. Within India itself the status of Mahāyāna sūtras was always disputed. The circulation of such sūtras was likely to have been much more a matter of individual and small-group activity (carried as treasures by individual wanderers, for example) than the activity of the Sangha of a Vinaya tradition as a whole. Moreover while Indian travellers wandered into Central Asia and thence to China, the wandering was not all one-way. Monks and nuns did indeed leave India for Central and Southeast Asia and China by sea and land routes, no doubt sometimes carrying with them their precious scriptures. These may have included certain scriptures central to the life of the monk or nun concerned but not considered authentic by the wider Sangha community. But of course we know that monks and nuns also came into the Holy Land of India from abroad. Jan Nattier has argued with considerable plausibility that perhaps the most popular Mahāyāna Prajñāpāramitā text of all, the short Heart (Hṛdaya) Sūtra, was actually in the form we have it now as a sūtra, originally a Chinese work abstracted and compiled from a Chinese translation of a much larger Prajñāpāramitā text. It may then have subsequently and successfully been introduced into India itself, probably by the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, and translated into Sanskrit (Nattier 1992). The same introduction from outside India has been claimed for the main sūtra of Bhaiṣajyaguru, the Medicine Buddha (Birnbaum 1980: 52 ff.). This sūtra was well known enough in India to be quoted by the great Indian scholar and poet Śāntideva in the early eighth century but could easily have been introduced into India at an earlier date.
