IT IS DIFFICULT to write about Indian Buddhism with any certainty even though its world-historical importance is not in doubt. Its decay in India from around the 13th century CE presents an evident difficulty, but subsequent developments were to make the task even more intractable. With the passage of time, its legacy of texts and philosophical ideas was ruthlessly effaced to the point where its chief custodians came to be located in Tibet or East Asia. It was Tibetan scholars who defined the doctrinal schools of Indian Mahayana and fitted them into a coherent narrative; most of its texts survive only in Chinese translation. The enormous literature of Buddhism left no legatees in its homeland, with the partial exception of Nepal.
Its physical remains were ransacked for building materials or obliterated by the elements, only to be rediscovered by colonial scholars during the 19th century. Their sheer abundance indicates the vitality of Buddhism for over a thousand years through successive waves of expansion and contraction. Unfortunately, its followers proved to be as lax as their Hindu counterparts in keeping records or writing down facts: much of our information about Indian Buddhism comes from Chinese pilgrims like Faxian, who visited India early in the 5th century CE, and Xuanzang, who reached eastern India in 633 and stayed until 643. Their journeys testify to the adaptability and fertility of the basic teaching, its ability to attract disparate cultures. In this essay, I examine the philosophical ideas of Buddhism across two culture-spheres, the Indic and the Sinic, to see what they can tell us about its history in India. Its soteriological and philosophical elements are fused – Indic culture, unlike the Grecian, lacked a dividing line between religion and philosophy – but it is possible to separate them in a limited way, for limited purposes.
Siddhartha Gautama, the future Buddha, lived some time between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE; his preaching career was restricted to a small region in northern and eastern India. Three hundred years later, his followers could be found as far as Gandhara to the west and Sri Lanka to the south. By the first century CE, Buddhism was rippling across the Pamirs, along the twin branches of the Silk Route, to knock on the doors of the Chinese empire. The earliest monastic communities in China were probably founded by foreign merchants. By the time of the Later Han dynasty – 25 to 220 CE – monasteries had been established in the imperial capital, Luoyang; some parts of the first indigenous Chinese Buddhist text, Mozu on the Settling of Doubts, may have been written towards the end of this period.
Buddhist writings reached China by way of Central Asia. Some were probably composed by Central Asian monks in their own languages. By this time Sanskrit, rather than Pali, had become the lingua franca of Indian Mahayana. Translations were usually done by committee, often under imperial patronage. The foreign missionary rendered his chosen text into oral Chinese as best he could; Chinese assistants converted this preliminary version into the classical language. A massive project of translation was sustained over five centuries, from the Later Han to the Tang dynasty. From the 5th century, Chinese Mahayana commenced an autonomous course of development, mixing Indic materials with indigenous ideas to create new doctrines, forms and schools of Buddhism. The major schools of Indian Mahayana had been thoroughly assimilated by this time. Their reinterpretations fed into the distinctively Chinese teachings of Tiantai, Huayan and Pure Land. The doctrinal and philosophical innovations of the Tang reached their terminus in the Song period, starting from the 10th century, when Chan became the dominant school of Chinese Buddhism.