Buddhlim In India

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Mahayanist cosmology there were many Bodies of Bliss, all

of them emanations of the single Body of Essence, but the
heavenly Buddha chiefly concerned with our world was
Amitdbha (Immeasurable Radiance ), who dwelt in Sukhdvati, the Happy Land, the heaven of the West. W ith
him was associated the earthly Gautama Buddha, and a
very potent and compassionate Bodhisattva, Avalokiteshvara
(the Lord W ho Looks Down ).
The older Buddhism and the newer flourished side by side
in India during the early centuries of the Christian era, and
we read of Buddhist monasteries in which some of the monks
were Mahayanist and some Hinayanist. But in general the
Buddhists of northwestern India were" either Mahayanists or
members of Hinayana sects much affected by Mahayanist
ideas. The austerer forms of Hinayana seem to have been
strongest in parts of western and southern India, and in
Ceylon. It was from northwestern India, under the rule of
the great Kushana empire (first to third centuries a .d .) that
Buddhism spread throughout central Asia to China; since
it emanated from the northwest, it was chiefly of the Mahayana or near-Mahayana type.
W e have already outlined the typical Mahayana teaching
about the heavenly Buddhas and bodhisattvas, which is a
matter of theology rather than of metaphysics. But Mahayana
also produced philosophical theories which were argued with
great ability, and which were influential on the thought of
Hinduism, as well as on that of the Far East. The two chief
schools of Mahayana philosophy were the Mddhyamika
(Doctrine of the Middle Position) and the Vijfidnavdda
(Doctrine of Consciousness) or Yogdcdra (The Way of
Yoga). The former school, the founder of which was Nagarjuna (first to second centuries a .d . ), taught that the phe
nomenal world had only a qualified reality, thus opposing
the doctrine of the Sarvastivadins. A monk with defective
eyesight may imagine that he sees flies in his begging bowl,
and they have full reality for the percipient. Though the
flies are not real the illusion of flies is. The Madhyamika
philosophers tried to prove that all our experience of the
phenomenal world is like that of the short-sighted monk, that
all beings labor under the constant illusion of perceiving
things where in fact there is only emptiness. This Emptiness