Genealogies of Mahāyāna Buddhism

Emptiness, Power and the question of Origin

Joseph Walser

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317354581
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Genealogies of Mah?y?na Buddhism offers a solution to a problem that some have called the holy grail of Buddhist studies: the problem of the "origins" of Mah?y?na Buddhism. In a work that contributes both to a general theory of religion and power for religious studies as well as to the problem of the origin of a Buddhist movement, Walser argues that that it is the neglect of political and social power in the scholarly imagination of the history of Buddhism that has made the origins of Mah?y?na an intractable problem. Walser challenges commonly-held assumptions about Mah?y?na Buddhism, offering a fascinating new take on its genealogy that traces its doctrines of emptiness and mind-only from the present day back to the time before Mah?y?na was "Mah?y?na." In situating such concepts in their political and social contexts across diverse regimes of power in Tibet, China and India, the book shows that what was at stake in the Mah?y?na championing of the doctrine of emptiness was the articulation and dissemination of court authority across the rural landscapes of Asia.

This text will be will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students and scholars of Buddhism, religious studies, history and philosophy.

Part I
Genealogies of Mahāyāna

1
Introduction

On origins and genealogies

This book addresses two separate but related problems in Buddhist studies. The first concerns the genealogy of what comes to be known as the “Great Vehicle,” or Mahāyāna Buddhism, the Buddhism comprising many of the traditions found in China, Korea, Vietnam and Japan including Zen, Pure Land and Tantric forms of Buddhism. The second problem concerns the political and social history of the two ideas associated with the name Mahāyāna. The first is that everything is to be characterized as “emptiness” (śūnyatā). The second, which is alternately presented as a corollary of the first, as an independent thesis or as the antithesis of the first, is that mind is the ultimate temporal and ontological source of all that we perceive. The mind-centered thesis is sometimes assumed to come later than the doctrine of emptiness and is referred to as the doctrine of “mind-only” (or “vijñāpti-mātra” – the alternate name for the Yogācāra School).

The question that this book seeks to address is, where did these ideas originate and how were they woven into the developments of the schools we know of as Mahāyāna. More importantly, why did anyone think that these ideas were important enough to perpetuate and invest considerable resources to reproducing across diverse geographic, cultural and historical contexts? The questions of where, how and why are related, although imperfectly. Despite the messiness of the available data from the early period, some scholars have seen the advent of Mahāyāna and especially its doctrines of emptiness and mind to be a kind of religious “revolution”¹ that was ultimately responsible for partitioning Buddhism into Mahāyāna and non-Mahāyāna. While most scholars are careful in how they characterize Mahāyāna, even the most anti-essentialist treatment will nevertheless include a discussion of the special relationship between Mahāyāna and the doctrines of emptiness and “mind-only” that constitute the seminal doctrines of Mahayana’s two main schools, the Mādhyamika and Yogācāra. We are thus led to conclude that it was something about these two ideas that started the revolution. Let me state my conclusion at the outset: there was no Mahāyāna revolution, and this is a book about it.²

Ever since I was a graduate student, the question of “the origin of Mahāyāna” was often referred to in quasi-religious terms. It was the “holy grail” of Buddhist studies, a kind of “Great White Whale” that had eluded some of the biggest names in Buddhist scholarship. Yet, by the late 1990s it seemed something more like the quest for cold fusion or the search for the Yeti – an impossible task and one whose motivations were suspected as being suspiciously “Protestant”³ anyway. The consensus – repeated often in not-so-hushed tones at conferences if not always in print – seemed to be that Mahāyāna began at some point around the beginning of the Common Era but that all of its first exemplars had been destroyed, leaving us with nothing but second- and third-generation versions of Mahāyāna. Mahāyāna’s origins were therefore permanently out of reach and nothing more could (or should) be said about it.⁴ I myself have been warned on more than one occasion to stay away from the topic. And yet problem of “the origin of Mahāyāna,” while being relegated to something of an academic curiosity, still nags. Professors in countless university classes on Buddhism introduce their sections on Mahāyāna by making apologetic remarks to the effect that we simply do not know how or why it began. So, chalk it up to Protestantism or simply to the fact that I think origins are fascinating in their own right, this book is my attempt to answer the question of the origins of Mahāyāna Buddhism by addressing its genealogies and historical configurations of power.

I believe that the place to begin the discussion is not with a summary or critique of past attempts to figure out the origins (which would be redundant for the specialist and would try the patience of the non-specialist), but with a broad theoretical observation of some pitfalls others have run into. One of the major problems that has been discussed by several scholars is that, in order to determine the origin of something we need to have a precise sense of what it is. But to say what Mahāyāna is at the outset of the investigation lures the researcher surreptitiously into the trap of what Paul Williams calls “the essentialist fallacy.”

The importance of appreciating doctrinal diversity applies not just to Buddhism as a whole but to the Mahāyāna itself. There is a fallacy which I shall call the ‘essentialist fallacy.’ It occurs when we take a single name or naming expression and assume that it must refer to one unified phenomenon … giving rise to the feeling that because we use the same word so there must be some unchanging core … Because the expression ‘Mahāyāna’ (or its equivalent in the local language) has been used by Buddhists from perhaps as early as the first century BCE to the present day, from India through Tibet, Central Asia, Mongolia, China to Japan, Far East Asia and the Western world, so it must refer to some identifiable characteristics which we can capture in a definition.⁵

Essentializing religion is an easy trap to fall into, and I myself have been guilty of it on occasion.⁶ I have no hard evidence for saying so, but I think that academic scholars of religion tend to reify religion even slightly more than practitioners of religion. This may have something to do with the way that religion is packaged for us. In the academic study of religion, we encounter religion in discrete units. At university, we can purchase a course on “Buddhism,” which will have a very different content than one on “Christianity.” Our textbooks are devoted to either “standalone” religions or treat a number of religions in which each religion is dedicated its own chapter (as in the genre of “world religion” textbooks). If genres create a horizon of expectations for the consumption and interpretation of information, then we can say that the way that “religions” are apportioned and sectioned off in religious studies textbooks creates the expectation that religions are discrete units of largely doctrinal propositions that are mutually exclusive. Religions, then, are kinds of boxes into which the scholar sorts people, doctrines and rituals. Boxed up in this manner, when something is “Mahāyāna” then it should be distinct and opposed to its other, which is said from one angle to be “Theravāda,” or “Sectarian Buddhism,” or from another angle said to be “Hinduism,” “Brahmanism,” Daoism, etc.

But the apparent discreteness of religious categories (which tends to be less pronounced in other academic genres, such as history) falters when we begin to look at the specifics of the religion involved. In order for a religion to be distinguishable from something else, it needs to display enough uniformity across instances to be identified as “religion x” in the first place. But this leads us to the uncomfortable question of who is deciding which examples will define the category? In the case of Mahāyāna, we could take the easy way out and say that a Mahāyānist is anyone who self-identifies as a Mahāyānist (on the rare occasion when the question would be posed). But then what? Can we really relate the name to any single set of propositions? On the one hand, in the 14th century, the famous Tibetan scholar/monk Jey Tsongkhapa asserted that the litmus test for Mahāyāna is bodhicitta, which he understood to be the mind motivated by compassion. But if this is Mahāyāna, then how do we reconcile this with other self-identifying Mahāyānists? What about self-identifying Mahāyānists of the “Mahāyāna sect” that (at least in official histories) terrorized the Chinese state of Wei in 515 CE. The latter did not appear to hold compassion to be a central feature of Mahāyāna. According to the History of the Wei Dynasty:

[The śramaṇa or monk Faqing from Jizhou called himself] Dacheng [大乘 or Mahāyāna]. [Faqing taught his followers] that one who has killed one man will be a bodhisattva of the first stage, while killing ten men will make him a bodhisattva of the tenth stage. He also mixed narcotic drugs and ordered his followers to take them. [As a result the minds of his followers became disturbed such that] fathers, sons, and brothers did not recognize each other and had nothing in mind but killing. Thus, his crowd killed the magistrate of Fucheng, devastated the district of Bohai and killed the officials … [T]he evil hordes became even stronger. Everywhere they slaughtered and destroyed monasteries and cloisters. They butchered the monks and nuns, and burned the sacred scriptures and images declaring: ‘The new Buddha has appeared who will eradicate the old demons.’⁷

Here, we find a group of allegedly 50,000 people identifying with the name “Mahāyāna,” led by a monk teaching them to pursue a bodhisattva path of 10 stages but presumably not thereby holding up compassion as an important part of that Mahāyāna. Williams is aware of this problem, and from his introduction we could get the impression that the only historically stable feature of Mahāyāna is the name itself, while what the name denotes is a moving target. This unstable and contested vocabulary contributes to the difficulties scholars face in creating their own narratives and analyses.

If we push the anti-essentialist argument a bit further, however, it turns out that our inability to place our collective fingers on the identity of Mahāyāna over time has something to do with the temporality of concepts themselves. And here we find that the question of what Mahāyāna is at any point in time cannot be so easily extricated from the question of origins. First of all, we cannot begin with a definition of Mahāyāna in order to then discern its origin. As Nietzsche pointed out long ago, once we latch onto ‘definitions,’ we have already stepped outside of history.

[A]ll concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated elude definition; only that which has no history is definable At an earlier stage, on the contrary, this synthesis of “meanings” can still be disentangled, as well as changed; one can still perceive how in each individual case the elements of the synthesis undergo a shift in value and rearrange themselves accordingly, so that now this, now that element comes to the fore and dominates at the expense of others, and under certain circumstances one element … appears to overcome all the remaining elements.⁸

In other words (to paraphrase Quentin Skinner) Mahāyāna doesn’t have a definition, it has a genealogy. But as Nāgārjuna himself might point out, genealogies don’t have origins – they produce them retrospectively. It is for this reason that have titled this book Genealogies of Mahāyāna Buddhism and not Origins of Mahāyāna Buddhism. Although I will address the issue of origins, the temporality of the very idea of origin⁹ must always incorporate that for which it is an origin. In other words, the origin must encompass quite an expansive “present” in order to be an origin of something, of an essence, of that without which it could not be considered an origin at all. Conversely, to pick out the “origin” among the sea of possible data requires us to appeal to a state of affairs which by our own admission is not yet fully there at the temporal point of origin. It is thus an atemporal or transcendent “Mahāyāna” that we would bring to bear on every historical case to discern the alleged “origin” of Mahāyāna in order to judge it to be an “origin” in the first place. We can’t say that a thing or an event is an origin; rather it becomes an origin. Put more simply, every origin is produced by the genealogy that looks back to it and is not simply the product of the factors that lead up to it.

In order to have a more accurate view of what is going on, we need to understand words “Mahāyāna” and “origin” to be pre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Genealogies of Mahāyāna
• Part II The genealogy of the Perfection of Wisdom
• Bibliography
• Index