Another factor in the growing diversity of schools was the necessity of responding to the spiritual needsof different people. Although, in a sense, there is but one spiritual path, no two people follow it inprecisely the same way. As general teachings are applied to more and more specific cases, ever more ofthe Dharma’s riches are revealed. Again, Buddhism was spreading into new geographical areas all the

The Unity of Buddhism Page 8
Extracted from Sangharakshita: A New Voice in the Buddhist Tradition by Dharmachari Subhuti


time and conditions were constantly changing in those areas where it was already established. TheDharma had to be communicated appropriately in new cultural and historical circumstances, for it is nota static set of words, fixed for all time; it is a living communication between the Enlightened and theunenlightened that must constantly be renewed and related to the people to whom it is directed, as theBuddha himself clearly recognised.

In elaborating particular aspects of the Dharma, a sense of the integrity of the teachings would often belost and a one-sidedness would develop. Those following the different trends of the original teachingsbegan to diverge more and more from one another, gradually hardening into distinct schools. As timewent on, there were increasing debates and controversies between the different schools, and they oftenformed their doctrines in dialectical relationship with each other. However, we must be careful not tothink of this process as analogous to the historical evolution of Christianity. The successive yanas did
not arise in the same way as the Protestant Reformation.

Luther for the early part of his life was a Catholic, for there was nothing but Catholicism in Western
Europe. He broke away from Catholicism to form something relatively new, which became Lutheranism.
He did not belong to or revive a separate independent tradition already existing alongside Catholicism.

But in the case of the Mahayana, there was already a living tradition, existing alongside the Hinayana, to
which [the great figures of the Mahayana] already belonged and which they brought into greater
prominence through their expositions and so on.29

The Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana then were the three main trends in the unfoldment of theselatent tendencies within Archaic Buddhism, each of which successively enjoyed a period of roughly 500years of overall dominance. Sangharakshita has given comprehensive characterisations of these trends

- although inevitably such general descriptions give rise to many exceptions. The Hinayana unfolded theethical dimension of the Buddha’s teaching through its emphasis on monastic life. It also elaborated hispsychological teachings by systematically classifying mental states in the Abhidharma literature. The
Mahayana, building on traditions going back to the Buddha, brought out the devotional side of spirituallife, through its worship of the stupas or reliquaries of the Buddha and through the cults of the archetypalBuddhas and Bodhisattvas. On the doctrinal side, it elaborated the metaphysical implications of theDharma. Finally, the Vajrayana took the imaginative and mythic aspects of the original teaching and,
based on Mahayana metaphysics, developed a language of ritual and symbol. Thus Sangharakshita seeseach yana as unfolding elements germinal in the original teaching.
The process of unfoldment was not, of course, as tidy and self-conscious as this description suggests. Allthe tendencies were present from the beginning.
One can’t separate the yanas completely. Even though one was dominant, the other was quite effectively
present nonetheless. While the Hinayana was formulated before the Mahayana, during the 500-year period

when the Hinayana was mainly dominant the Mahayana was present as a purely spiritual transmission.30
The spirit of those latent tendencies within the original teaching was kept alive among certain groups ofdisciples and their successors. Under particular circumstances, the tendencies were gradually madeexplicit in texts, doctrines, and practices, to which later the generic terms ‘Mahayana’ or ‘Vajrayana’would be applied. But these were not, in the early stages of their evolution, seen as completely separateand isolated from the more highly formulated Hinayana teachings and practices.As each successive trendbecame explicit, it did so alongside and in relation to the trend or trends that had emerged before it.
Chinese pilgrims to India reported

that Mahayana and Hinayana monks lived side by side in the same vihara. The only difference between
them was that the Mahayana monks studied the Mahayana sutras and worshipped the Bodhisattvas in
addition to all the other things that the Hinayana bhikkhus were doing.31

Vajrayana was also practised in the great monastic universities and its devotees were often, perhapsusually, monks ordained in the Hinayana ordination lineages and studying the Mahayana sutras.

Buddhism had died out in India by the fourteenth century. However, it had, by then, been dispersedthroughout Asia. The forms of Buddhism that have survived to the present are each based on one or moreaspects of Indian Buddhism, further developed within their new setting. There are three majorgeographical groupings of these surviving historical forms of Buddhism: