The Buddhist Scriptures Anonymous - Various Authors

Mahāyāna sūtras

See Mahāyāna sūtras for historical background and a list of some sutras categorised by source.

Around the beginning of the common era, a new genre of sutra literature began to be written with a focus on the Bodhisattva ideal, commonly known as Mahāyāna ("Great Vehicle") or Bodhisattvayāna ("Bodhisattva Vehicle").[50] The earliest of these sutras do not call themselves 'Mahāyāna,' but use the terms Vaipulya (extensive, expansive) sutras, or Gambhira (deep, profound) sutras.[51]

There are various theories of how Mahāyāna emerged. According to David Drewes, it seems to have been "primarily a textual movement, focused on the revelation, preaching, and dissemination of Mahāyāna sutras, that developed within, and never really departed from, traditional Buddhist social and institutional structures."[51] Early dharmabhanakas (preachers, reciters of these sutras) were influential figures, and promoted these new texts throughout the Buddhist communities.[51]

Many of these Mahāyāna sūtras were written in Sanskrit (in hybrid forms and in classical Sanskrit) and then later translated into the Tibetan and Chinese Buddhist canons (the Kangyur and the Taishō Tripiṭaka respectively) which then developed their own textual histories. Sanskrit had been adopted by Buddhists in north India during the Kushan era and Sanskrit Buddhist literature became the dominant tradition in Buddhist India until the decline of Buddhism there.[52]

Mahāyāna sūtras are also generally regarded by the Mahāyāna tradition as being more profound than the śrāvaka texts as well as generating more spiritual merit and benefit. Thus, they are seen as superior and more virtuous to non-Mahāyāna sutras.[53][54] The Mahāyāna sūtras are traditionally considered by Mahāyāna Buddhists to be the word of the Buddha. Mahāyāna Buddhists explained the emergence of these new texts by arguing that they had been transmitted in secret, via lineages of supernatural beings (such as the nagas) until people were ready to hear them, or by stating that they had been revealed directly through visions and meditative experiences to a select few.[55]

According to David McMahan, the literary style of the Mahāyāna sūtras reveals how these texts were mainly composed as written works and how they also needed to legitimate themselves to other Buddhists. They used different literary and narrative ways to defend the legitimacy of these texts as Buddha word.[56] Mahāyāna sūtras such as the Gaṇḍavyūha also often criticize early Buddhist figures, such as Sariputra for lacking knowledge and goodness, and thus, these elders or śrāvaka are seen as not intelligent enough to receive the Mahāyāna teachings, while more the advanced elite, the bodhisattvas, are depicted as those who can see the highest teachings.[57]

These sūtras were not recognized as being Buddha word by various early Buddhist schools and there was lively debate over their authenticity throughout the Buddhist world. Various Mahāyāna sūtras warn against the charge that they are not word of the Buddha, showing that they are aware of this claim.[55] Buddhist communities such as the Mahāsāṃghika school were divided along these doctrinal lines into sub-schools which accepted or did not accept these texts.[58] The Theravāda school of Sri Lanka also was split on the issue during the medieval period. The Mahavihara sub-sect rejected these texts and the (now extinct) Abhayagiri sect accepted them. Theravāda commentaries mention these texts (which they call Vedalla/Vetulla) as not being the Buddha word and being counterfeit scriptures.[59] Modern Theravāda generally does not accept these texts as buddhavacana (word of the Buddha).[11]

The Mahāyāna movement remained quite small until the fifth century, with very few manuscripts having been found before then (the exceptions are from Bamiyan). However, according to Walser, the fifth and sixth centuries saw a great increase in the production of these texts.[60] By this time, Chinese pilgrims, such as Faxian, Yijing, and Xuanzang were traveling to India, and their writings do describe monasteries which they label 'Mahāyāna' as well as monasteries where both Mahāyāna monks and non-Mahāyāna monks lived together.[61]

Mahāyāna sūtras contain several elements besides the promotion of the bodhisattva ideal, including "expanded cosmologies and mythical histories, ideas of purelands and great, 'celestial' Buddhas and bodhisattvas, descriptions of powerful new religious practices, new ideas on the nature of the Buddha, and a range of new philosophical perspectives."[51] These texts present stories of revelation in which the Buddha teaches Mahāyāna sutras to certain bodhisattvas who vow to teach and spread these sutras.[51] These texts also promoted new religious practices that were supposed to make Buddhahood easy to achieve, such as "hearing the names of certain Buddhas or bodhisattvas, maintaining Buddhist precepts, and listening to, memorizing, and copying sutras." Some Mahāyāna sūtras claim that these practices lead to rebirth in Pure lands such as Abhirati and Sukhavati, where becoming a Buddha is much easier to achieve.[51]

Several Mahāyāna sūtras also depict important Buddhas or Bodhisattvas not found in earlier texts, such as the Buddhas Amitabha, Akshobhya and Vairocana, and the bodhisattvas Maitreya, Mañjusri, Ksitigarbha, and Avalokiteshvara. An important feature of Mahāyāna is the way that it understands the nature of Buddhahood. Mahāyāna texts see Buddhas (and to a lesser extent, certain bodhisattvas as well) as transcendental or supramundane (lokuttara) beings, who live for eons constantly helping others through their activity.[62]

According to Paul Williams, in Mahāyāna, a Buddha is often seen as "a spiritual king, relating to and caring for the world", rather than simply a teacher who after his death "has completely 'gone beyond' the world and its cares".[63] Buddha Sakyamuni's life and death on earth is then usually understood as a "mere appearance", his death is an unreal show, in reality he continues to live in a transcendent reality.[63] Thus the Buddha in the Lotus sutra says that he is "the father of the world", "the self existent (svayambhu)...protector of all creatures", who has "never ceased to exist" and only "pretends to have passed away."[64]

Hundreds of Mahāyāna sūtras have survived in Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan translation. There many different genres or classes of Mahāyāna sutras, such as the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras, the Tathāgatagarbha sūtras and the Pure Land sūtras. The different Mahāyāna schools have many varied classification schemas for organizing them and they see different texts as having higher authority than others.

Some Mahāyāna sūtras are also thought to display a distinctly tantric character, like some of the shorter Perfection of Wisdom sutras and the Mahavairocana Sutra. At least some editions of the Kangyur include the Heart Sutra in the tantra division.[65] Such overlap is not confined to "neighbouring" yanas: at least nine "Sravakayana" texts can be found in the tantra divisions of some editions of the Kangyur.[66] One of them, the Atanatiya Sutra, is also included in the Mikkyo (esoteric) division of the standard modern collected edition of Sino-Japanese Buddhist literature.[67] Some Mahāyāna texts also contain dhāraṇī, which are chants that are believed to have magical and spiritual power.

Major Mahāyāna sūtras

The following is a list of some well known Mahāyāna sutras which have been studied by modern scholarship:

• Ajitasena Sutra – A "proto-Mahāyāna" text, possibly one of the earliest texts with Mahāyāna elements.
• Ugraparipṛcchā Sūtra – An early Mahāyāna text focused on bodhisattva monasticism.
• Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra – Possibly the earliest Prajñāpāramitā text.
• Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā (Diamond Sutra) – Another possibly early Prajñāpāramitā text, very popular.
• Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya (Heart Sutra) – Another very popular Prajñāpāramitā text.
• Longer Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtra (Infinite Life Sutra) – An influential text in Pure Land Buddhism.
• Amitabha Sutra – Another Pure land text.
• Contemplation Sutra – Another Pure land text.
• Pratyutpanna Sutra.
• Shurangama Samadhi Sutra.
• Saddharmapundarīka-sūtra (Lotus Sutra) – One of the most influential texts in East Asian Buddhism.
• Mahāratnakūta Sūtra – Actually a collection of various sūtras.
• Suvarnaprabhasa Sutra (or Golden Light Sutra).
• Avataṃsaka Sūtra – A compilation of numerous texts, such as the Gaṇḍavyūha Sutra and the Daśabhūmika Sūtra.
• Sandhinirmocana Sutra (c. 2nd century CE), the main sutra of Yogacara Buddhism, introduces the doctrine of the "three turnings".
• Tathāgatagarbha Sūtra – One of the key "Buddha nature" (Tathāgatagarbha) sūtras.
• Shrīmālādevi-simhanāda Sūtra – A "Buddha nature" text.
• Mahayana Mahaparinirvana Sutra – A "Buddha nature" text, very influential in East Asian Buddhism.
• Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra – Includes Yogacara and Tathāgatagarbha elements, influential in Zen Buddhism.
• Samādhirāja Sūtra (or Candrapradīpa Sūtra), influential in the Madhyamaka scholasticism of Tibet.
• Vimalakīrti Sūtra – A sutra which depicts the teachings of a layman on non-dualism.
• Brahmajāla Sūtra – A text which contains an influential listing of bodhisattva precepts.
• Kāraṇḍavyūhasūtra, which introduces the Om Mani Padme Hum mantra.
• Uṣṇīṣa Vijaya Dhāraṇī Sūtra.

Indian treatises

The Mahāyāna commentarial and exegetical literature is vast. Many of these exegetical and scholastic works are called Śāstras, which can refer to a scholastic treatise, exposition or commentary.

Central to much of Mahāyāna philosophy are the works of the Indian scholar Nagarjuna. Especially important is his magnum opus, the Mūlamadhyamika-karikā, or Root Verses on the Middle Way, a seminal text on the Madhyamika philosophy. Various other authors of the Madhyamaka school followed him and wrote commentaries to his texts or their own treatises.

Another very influential work which traditionally attributed to Nagarjuna In East Asia is the Dà zhìdù lùn (*Mahāprajñāpāramitopadeśa, The Great Discourse on Prajñāpāramitā). This is a massive Mahayana Buddhist treatise and commentary on the Prajñāpāramitā sutra in Twenty-five Thousand Lines, and it has been extremely important in the development of the major Chinese Buddhist traditions.[68] Its authorship to Nagarjuna however has been questioned by modern scholars and it only survives in the Chinese translation by Kumārajīva (344–413 CE).[69]

The Yogācārabhūmi-Śāstra (fourth century CE) is another very large treatise which focuses on yogic praxis and the doctrines of the Indian Yogacara school. Unlike the Dà zhìdù lùn, it was studied and transmitted in both the East Asian Buddhist and the Tibetan Buddhist traditions.

The works of Asanga, a great scholar and systematizer of the Yogacara, are also very influential in both traditions, including his magnum opus, the Mahāyāna-samgraha, and the Abhidharma-samuccaya (a compendium of Abhidharma thought that became the standard text for many Mahayana schools especially in Tibet). Various texts are also said to have received by Asanga from the Bodhisattva Maitreya in the Tushita god realm, including works such as Madhyāntavibhāga, the Mahāyāna-sūtrālamkāra, and the Abhisamayālamkara. Their authorship remains disputed by modern scholars however.[70] Asanga's brother Vasubandhu wrote a large number of texts associated with the Yogacara including: Trisvabhāva-nirdesa, Vimsatika, Trimsika, and the Abhidharmakośa-bhāsya. Numerous commentaries were written by later Yogacara exegetes on the works of these two brothers.

The 9th Century Indian Buddhist Shantideva produced two texts: the Bodhicaryāvatāra has been a strong influence in many schools of the Mahayana. It is notably a favorite text of the 14th Dalai Lama.

Dignāga is associated with a school of Buddhist logic that tried to establish which texts were valid sources of knowledge (see also Epistemology). He produced the Pramāna-samuccaya, and later Dharmakirti wrote the Pramāna-vārttikā, which was a commentary and reworking of the Dignaga text.

East Asian works

The Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana (Dàshéng Qǐxìn Lùn) is an influential text in East Asian Buddhism, especially in the Hua-yen school of China, and its Japanese equivalent, Kegon. While it is traditionally attributed to Ashvaghosha, most scholars now hold it is a Chinese composition.[71]

The Dhyāna sutras (Chan-jing) are a group of early Buddhist meditation texts which contain meditation teachings from the Sarvastivada school along with some early proto-Mahayana meditations. They were mostly the work of Buddhist Yoga teachers from Kashmir and were translated into Chinese early on.

The early period of the development of Chinese Buddhism was concerned with the collection and translation of texts into Chinese and the creation of the Chinese Buddhist canon. This was often done by traveling overland to India, as recorded in the Great Tang Records on the Western Regions, by the monk Xuanzang (c. 602–664), who also wrote a commentary on Yogacara which remained influential, the Discourse on the Perfection of Consciousness-only.

East Asian Buddhism began to develop its own unique doctrinal literature with the rise of the Tiantai School and its major representative, Zhiyi (538–597 CE) who wrote important commentaries on the Lotus sutra as well as the first major comprehensive work on meditation composed in China, the Mohe Zhiguan (摩訶止観). Another important school of Chinese Buddhism is Huayan, which focused on developing their philosophical texts from the Avatamsaka. An important patriarch of this school is Fazang who wrote many commentaries and treatises.

The Tripitaka Koreana, which was crafted in two versions (the first one was destroyed by fire during the Mongol invasions of Korea), is a Korean collection of the Tripitaka carved onto 81,258 wooden printing blocks during the 13th century. Still intact in good condition after some 750 years, it has been described by the UNESCO committee as "one of the most important and most complete corpus of Buddhist doctrinal texts in the world".[72]

Zen Buddhism developed a large literary tradition based on the teachings and sayings of Chinese Zen masters. One of the key texts in this genre is the Platform Sutra attributed to Zen patriarch Huineng, it gives an autobiographical account of his succession as Ch'an Patriarch, as well as teachings about Ch'an theory and practice. Other texts are Koan collections, which are compilations of the sayings of Chinese masters such as the Blue Cliff Record and The Gateless Gate. Another key genre is that of compilations of Zen master biographies, such as the Transmission of the Lamp. Buddhist poetry was also an important contribution to the literature of the tradition.

After the arrival of Chinese Buddhism in Japan, Korea and Vietnam; they developed their own traditions and literature in the local language.