..续本文上一页 influence by teaching and example; but, they held, the Buddha himself had aimed at a state that would enable him to promote the welfare and happiness of the hosts of devas and humans. Thus, these thinkers felt, the superior choice, the higher way to follow the Buddha, was to set out on the same quest that the Buddha had set for himself: by taking the vows of a bodhisattva and following the bodhisattva course. This would have marked the emergence of the bodhisattva-yāna as a conception of the ideal Buddhist way of life, the way binding upon the true follower of the Enlightened One.

　　This ideal emerged from a different starting point than Early Buddhism, a different visionary background. Whereas Early Buddhism takes (as we saw above) the common human condition as its starting point, and even views the Buddha as beginning as a human being subject to human frailties, early-period Mahāyāna Buddhism takes as its starting point the long-range cosmic background to a Buddha”s attainment of Buddhahood. It looks back to his first conception of the bodhicitta, his original vows, and his practice of the pāramitās over countless lives, and treats these as the paradigm for practice. That is, it sees this process, not merely as a description of the path that a Buddha follows, but as a recommendation of the path that his true disciples should follow; some later versions of Mahāyāna see this as the actualization of a potential for Buddhahood, the tathāgatagarbha or "embryo of the Thus-Come One," already embedded deep within us.

　　We can imagine a period when the bodhisattva-yāna had been consciously adopted by a growing number of Buddhists, probably first within small circles of monks, who sought to guide themselves by the sūtras of the Nikāyas or Āgamas and the Jātaka stories dealing with the Buddha”s past lives. They were still members of early Buddhist communities and probably had not yet even become conscious of themselves as branching off to form a new tradition. They would not have thought of themselves as "Mahāyāna Buddhists," as we understand the term today, but simply as communities of Buddhists pledged to follow the bodhisattva-yāna, which they might have designated the mahāyāna simply in the sense that it constituted a "great course" to enlightenment. However, while for some time they may have tried to remain within the fold of mainstream Buddhism, once they began to openly propagate the bodhisattva ideal, they would have found themselves in open confrontation with those who adhered more strictly to the ideas and ideals of the older, well-established sūtras. This confrontation would have heightened their sense of distinctness and thus led to their conscious amalgamation into communities revolving around a new vision of the Buddhist path and goal.

　　At this point they might have found that the teachings of the Nikāya-Āgama sūtras, which describe the practices needed to attain personal liberation from the round of birth and death, no longer met their needs. They would, of course, still have accepted these teachings as authoritative, since they stemmed directly from the Buddha, but they would also felt the need for scriptures rooted in the same authority that provide detailed teachings about the practices and stages of the bodhisattva path, which aimed at nothing less than perfect Buddhahood. It was to fill this need, presumably, that the Mahāyāna sūtras began to appear on the Indian Buddhist scene. Exactly how these sūtras were first composed and made their appearance is a matter about which contemporary scholarship is still largely in the dark;[5] for all we have at our disposal are Mahāyāna sūtras that are fairly well developed and represent Mahāyāna Buddhism at what we might call "stage two" or even "stage three" of its develop…

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