[Buddha-l] Re: Theravada & Sarvastivada

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Sun, 2005-10-16 at 13:42 +1000, Kate wrote:

> Taking this further, my notes say that Sautrantika is a development of
> Sarvastivada, and that Sautrantika in turn gave rise to Yogacara. 

Sautrantika was a reaction to, and rejection of, scholasticism in
general, one of the types of scholasticism being Sarvastivada. So you
could say that Sautrantika was a development of Sarvastivada only in the
sense that Christian Fundamentalism develops out of liberal
Protestantism.

There is no sense in which Yogacara grew out of Sautrantika. It was a
different movement altogether. There was a bit of doctrinal overlap,
enough that much later scholastics classified some individual
philosophers as both Sautrantika and Yogacara.

> However I also have it that Yogacara is Mahayana.  Is this correct?  I'm having
> trouble putting all this together. 

Quite honestly, it's not worth the bother. The attempt to place people
into schools is artificial in the extreme. The very idea of schools may
have made some sense one thousand years ago in India, but now it really
has no relevance at all, because none of those schools still exists.

-- 
Richard Hayes