Thirty_Years_of_Buddhist_studies,Conze

50 Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies
Mahayana seems to have originated. On the one hand we have
the South of India, which was in close trading relations with
the Roman Empire, as is shown by the huge hoards of Roman
coins found there in recent years. And it was in the region
round Nagarjunikonda, in the South, near the temple of
Amaravati, which has rightly been called a "Dravido-Alexandrian
synthesis 11 , that tradition places the development of
the first Mahayana Scriptures, i.e. the Sutras on Perfect
Wisdom, and where also Nagarjuna (c. A.D. IOO), the greatest
philosopher of the Mahayana, appears to have lived. The second
centre of the incipient Mahayana was in the North-West of
India, where the successor states of Alexander the Great kept
open a constant channel for Hellenistic and Roman influences,
as the art found in that region amply demonstrates. Its openness
to foreign, non-Indian influences was indeed one of the
features which distinguished the Mahayana from the older
forms of Buddhism.
We know little about the actual causes which brought about
this revolution in Buddhist thought. Two, however, seem
certain, the exhaustion of the Arhani ideal, and the pressure
of the laity.
As for the first, the older Buddhism was designed to produce
a type of saint known as Arhant—a person who has been
liberated once and for all from the cycle of birth and death.
Three or four centuries after the Buddha's Nirvana the methods
which had at first produced Arhants in profusion lost their
potency, fewer and fewer monks reached the goal, and the
conviction gained ground that the time for Arhants was over.
When the expected fruits were no longer forthcoming, it was
natural for a section of the community to explore new avenues,
and they replaced the Arhant ideal by the Bodhisattva ideal
(pp. 54~^7).
Relations of the monks with the laity had always been
precarious. Here at its base was the Achilles' heel of the whole
soaring edifice. The Mahayana gave much greater weight to
laymen. It could count on much popular support for its
emphasis on active service, for its opinion that people are as
important as t( dharmas" (Pali, dhatnma, 'events'), for its
attacks on the selfishness of monks who think only of their own
welfare, for its censure of "haughty" and "conceited" monks