Thirty_Years_of_Buddhist_studies,Conze

MAHAYANA BUDDHISM
Introduction
e word Mahay ana, or " Great Vehicle", is the name gener-
X ally given to those ideas which dominated the second phase
of Buddhist thought. One speaks of a "vehicle "because the
Buddhist doctrine, or Dharma (Pali, Dhamma, from dhr),
is conceived as a raft, or a ship, which carries us across the
ocean of this world of suffering to a f * Beyond", to salvation, to
Nirvana. Its adherents called it "great" by way of praising the
universality of its tenets and intentions, in opposition to the
narrowness of the other Buddhist schools, which they describe
as the " Hinayana", as the " inferior" vehicle, a term naturally
not much cherished by those to whom they apply it. At present
the Mahayana is confined to the Northern half of the Buddhist
world, and the Buddhists of Nepal, Tibet, China, Korea and
Japan are nearly all Mahayanists. The South, on the other
hand, is entirely dominated by the Theravadins, one of the
eighteen traditional sects of the Hinayana, and their form of
Buddhism is the national religion of Ceylon, Burma and Siam.
The other seventeen Hinayana sects disappeared seven hundred
years ago when the Muhamm^dans swept into Northern India
and destroyed its flourishing Buddhist monasteries.
In point of time the rise of ihe Mahayana coincides with the
beginning of the Christian era. It must have gathered momentum
in the first pre-Christian centuries, but many of its basic
ideas go back, as we shall see, to the fourth or fifth century B.C.,
if not to the Buddha himself. But the literature which sets out
the specific Mahayana doctrines is attested only for the beginning
of the Christian era, and this raises an interesting, and so
far unresolved, historical problem. How can we account for the
observation that Buddhism, just at the time when Christianity
itself arose, underwent a radical reform of its basic tenets which
made it much more similar to Christianity than it had been
before? To show the nature of the problem, I will mention just
three parallels between the Mahayana and Christianity. First of