[Buddha-l] Mahaayaana suutras

[Joy Vriens]

I generally assumed that mahaayaana suutras were written in sanskrit and therefore composed in India. But if Dan's observation and Schopen's suggestion (both below) hold any truth, then those erudite Indian (or neighbourhood countries) monks who went to the East, where they spend many years working with local erudite monks and translators might have composed some of the mahaayaana suutras there in sanskrit and then helped translating them in the respective languages of the countries they went to. Later they could have taken back the "originals" with them to India. Is there any evidence for this? I am not talking about apocrypha or "translations" with missing equivalent Indian originals.

Dan
>8. The import for how we think about Buddhism today is, briefly, the forms 
>of Buddhism that have survived and have been transmitted to the West (aside 
>from Theravada), are transplants brought to various places outside India by 
>missionaries. While there is some evidence that Sammitiyas had small 
>communities in Java and elsewhere outside India, they basically dominated 
>the Indian scene for many centuries, while missionaries belonging to OTHER 
>Buddhist sects -- i.e., actual minorities -- are the ones who planted the 
>forms that we receive today as authoritative (Tibetan Buddhism, Chinese 
>Buddhism, etc.). Outside India, these minorities became majorities. We might 
>even wonder exactly which sort of Indian Buddhists became missionaries? Why 
>did they go abroad, rather than some other sect? How representative of the 
>actual Indian scene are (a) our imagined history of Buddhism in India, with 
>the imagined prominence of non-heterodox, non-pudgalavadin schools, and (b) 
>our sense of what constituted the acceptable Buddhist doctrine embraced by 
>the majority of clerics and laypeople in India? 

Schopen
"These [Hiinayaana monastic] orders, it is beginning to appear, may well have developed as very successful 
institutions, well suited—through a series of interlocking and mutual religious, 
economic, and social obligations—to the needs of their local communities.50 Their 
success, in fact, may have created a situation where there was no felt need for what 
the MahOEyOEna thought it had to offer. The mainstream monk, in short, may have 
been completely misunderstood because in large part he has been too often viewed 
through the lens of MahOEyOEna polemic. 
If, again, these suggestions are even approximately correct, we may, as well, 
have uncovered a major motive for the movement of the MahOEyOEna outside India. 
Established groups securely set in their social environment have little motive to 
move. It is the marginalized, those having little or limited access to economic resources, 
social prestige, and political power, that have strong incentives to leave— 
the unsuccessful. Such considerations may account for the migration of the 
MahOEyOEna; they may account as well for the migration of the TheravOEda: it may be 
that neither did very well at home. The ¤nal irony is that we might know most 
about those Buddhist groups that—from an Indian point of view—were the least 
signi¤cant and the least successful. That at least is a distinct possibility."
Schopen/Figments and Fragments of Mahayana Buddhism in India