[Buddha-l] Mahayana taught by the Buddha?

[Rob Hogendoorn (Leiden University)]

In "From the Academy: The Buddhist and the Buddhologist" (Triycle  
Summer 1995 p. 84-85) Donald Lopez gives a bit more detail on the  
Dalai Lama's stance vis-a-vis the Buddha teaching Mahayana sutras:

"During the seminar, three students who were completing dissertations  
on Indian Buddhism made brief presentations to His Holiness. They  
explained how nineteenth-century scholars of Buddhism had seen the  
Mahayana as a degeneration of the original teachings of the Buddha.  
Later scholars saw the Mahayana as a lay movement responding to the  
conservatism of the monastic establishment. After this perceived  
split, which occurred between the first century BCE and the first  
century CE, two branches of Buddhism, the Hinayana and the Mahayana,  
developed along parallel but divergent courses. More recently,  
scholars (such as Gregory Schopen) have sought to look beyond the  
polemical Mahayana condemnations of the Hinayana and to consider  
archaeological, art-historical, and epigraphical evidence. This  
research suggests that the Mahayana did not begin as a single and  
self-conscious movement, but instead was a disparate collection of  
“cults of the book” centered around new sutras composed around the  
beginning of the Common Era. These were not lay cults, but ones in  
which monks and nuns were full and active participants. The evidence  
even suggests that so-called Mahayana and Hinayana monks often lived  
side by side within the same monasteries, following the same rules,  
engaging in many of the’ same practices, throughout the history of  
Buddhism in India. Indeed, the first epigraphic use of the term  
Mahayana occurs only in the fifth century CE, some five hundred years  
after the composition of the first Mahayana sutras.

His Holiness listened attentively to all of this, sometimes stopping  
and asking his translator to clarify a term or a point. But at the  
end of the presentation he remained silent and only spoke after I  
asked him what he thought about what the students had said. “It’s  
something to know,” he said in Tibetan, using the term shes bya  
(literally, “object of knowledge”), evoking the Buddhist aphorism  
“Objects of knowledge are limitless.” That is, there are infinite  
things that can be known; hence it is important to consider carefully  
what is truly worth knowing. He went on to say that he has a friend,  
a great lama, who, when giving a tantric initiation, saw all the past  
masters of the lineage appear in the air along the ceiling of the  
temple. He was certain that his friend was telling the truth. He  
conceded that what the students had told him was interesting and that  
it would be good for Buddhists to have some knowledge of Western  
scholarship on Buddhism. However, in the end, he seemed to view  
Buddhist practice and Buddhist scholarship (at least of the Western  
variety) as ultimately irreconcilable. He told the students that if  
he accepted what they had told him, he would be able only to believe  
in the rupakaya, the form body of the Buddha that appears in the  
world. He could not believe in the sambhogakaya , the body of  
complete enjoyment, which appears to advanced bodhisattvas in the  
splendor of the pure lands. And he could not believe in the  
dharmakaya, the Buddha’s omniscient mind and its emptiness. “If I  
believed what you told me,” he said, “the Buddha would only be a nice  
person.”

Best wishes,

Rob Hogendoorn

Op 20-jun-2005, om 22:12 heeft Andrew Ward het volgende geschreven:

> The Dalai Lama asserts in one of his books that it was in fact  
> taught by the Buddha, but he does not go into any more detail than  
> that.