Just as the intra-uterine development of the individual recapitulates the development of the race, so before

he can issue from the womb of ignorance, and be born into the World of Enlightenment, the student of the

Dharma must recapitulate in his spiritual life the history of Buddhism.41

As we see in this passage just quoted, Sangharakshita has incorporated a modified version of this Tibetantriyana view into much of his work. In particular, A Survey of Buddhism (1957) and his lecture series
on ‘Aspects of the Bodhisattva Ideal’ (1969) and ‘Creative Symbols of the Tantric Path toEnlightenment’ (1972) speak this language. However, he has since come to the conclusion that the three
yanas cannot be seen as a spiritual sequence.

Clearly there are deeper and deeper levels of the spiritual path. However, we can’t really equate them with

the Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana in the traditional Tibetan sense.42

Sangharakshita values all three historical yanas equally. Each is largely the elaboration of an aspect oraspects of the original teaching and represents a particular emphasis. Teachings that relate to the deepestlevels of the path can be found in all three yanas.

The Tibetan schematisation, inherited from the late Pala dynasty Buddhism of north-eastern India,
enshrines the way in which Indian Buddhists had coped with the evolution of doctrine. Sangharakshitapoints out that in ancient India, as in the European Dark and Middle Ages, there was little idea ofhistorical development. The past was largely seen as exactly like the present. Buddhists at any periodwould have thought of themselves as living the same life and following the same teachings as discipleshad done in the time of the Buddha himself. This determined the way in which they coped with theBuddhism they inherited.

The Unity of Buddhism Page 11
Extracted from Sangharakshita: A New Voice in the Buddhist Tradition by Dharmachari Subhuti


We have already seen that there is a tendency for original spiritual vitality to be lost as its crystallisationsharden around it. But to the Indian Buddhists of the time those crystallisations actually were theteachings of the Buddha. Having no idea of historical development, they could not reject them nor couldthey correct them, so they created what amounts to a myth. They saw the Buddha as having taughteverything that had come down to them - but for the sake of beings of lesser capacity. The morespiritually vital message they considered missing from what they inherited they then presented as theBuddha’s further revelation for beings of superior spiritual attainment.

Sangharakshita sees an example of this process in the White Lotus Sutra, an important Mahayana text.
In the Sutra, the Buddha is presented as teaching that the three paths of early Buddhism (not here the
three yanas we have been dealing with) were really one. Here we must briefly recount a little doctrinalhistory, since it illustrates an important general historical dynamic. Originally, the Buddha’s attainmentof Enlightenment was considered exactly the same as that of his Enlightened disciples, who were known
as arahants. They only differed in that the Buddha had gained Enlightenment without any help from ateacher, while the arahants had done so in his footsteps. The content of their Enlightened experiencewas, however, exactly the same as his. Over the centuries this view was lost. The idea gradually arosethat the Buddha was much more developed than the arahants. So there came to be a choice. One could
aim to become either a Buddha or an arahant. A third, intermediate, category was added, the
pratyekabuddha. The paths to becoming a Buddha, an arahant, and a pratyekabuddha were considered
real alternatives leading to real alternative spiritual goals. Actually, they simply represented scholasticmisreadings of the original teachings.

By the time the White Lotus Sutra had emerged, the original teaching of the Buddha, as one may call it, had

shrunk at the hands of some people and arahantship had become a rather individualistic sort of goal.

Whoever composed the White Lotus Sutra wanted to correct that development, but didn’t understand that

there had been some sort of historical development. They couldn’t say, ‘Look, this is not what the Buddha

taught historically,’ so they created a myth to explain the matter. They presented the Buddha as giving this

further teaching that all the paths coalesced and that in reality there was only one path for all.43
In this way there came to be a ‘stack’ of teachings, each one correcting the degeneracy of the precedingby means of the myth of the Buddha giving further and higher teachings.

In Tibetan Buddhist schools the path of the three yanas is even further subdivided, in different ways bydifferent schools. Some Chinese and Japanese masters similarly arranged the teachings in complexsequences. Sangharakshita uses the term ‘ultra-ism’ to describe the phenomenon of continuously addingfurther stages.