Thirty_Years_of_Buddhist_studies,Conze

14 Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies
The Mahay ana
One hundred years after the Nirvana the Buddhist community
divided itself into a "rationalist" and a f< mystical" section.
The "mystical" wing formed the Mahasanghika school, which
three centuries later developed into the Mahayana. In using
the words "rationalists" and "mystics" we must, of course,
beware of taking them in their European sense. No Buddhist
" rationalist" was ever bitterly hostile to religion in the sense in
which Gibbon, Hume, Lady Wootton and The Rationalist
Press Association hate it as a degrading superstition. No
Buddhist "mystic" ever turned against rational thinking as
such with the fervour of a Petrus Damiani, a William Blake,
or the "obscurantist" wing of the French, Spanish or Irish
Catholic Church.
The difference was really one between the rational mysticism
of the Mahayana, and the mystically tinged rationalism of the
Theravadins or Sarvastivadins. They had much common
ground on the middle ranges of the path where the ascetic strove
for emancipation in a quite rational and businesslike manner.
Neithdr side denied that below these there was the comparative
irrationality of popular religion, and above it the superrationality
of the higher stages of the path and of the top levels
of samadhi and prajnd. They differed only in the emphasis
which they gave to these phenomena. The proto-Mahayanists
and the Mahayanists themselves looked more kindly upon the
religious needs of ordinary people, and in addition they had
much more to say about the higher stages of the path, and in
particular about the transcendental knowledge, or intuition, of
the Absolute, the Unconditioned.
The author of an interesting and valuable book 1 on the
essentially rationalistic Buddhism of Burma sees the specifically
religious element in the assumption of a "thoughtdefying
ultimate", i.e. of "The Immortal" or Nirvana, which
"is marked by the paradox of affirmation and negation, of
sustaining faith and halting language''. When they talk so much
more freely about the Absolute and its immediate approaches
we need not necessarily assume that the Mahayanists were
1 R. L. Slater, Paradox and Nirvana, 1951.