Kushan Period, North India c 50 - 320 CE

Cave 2 Kanheri Early to Later Andhra c 75 BCE - 100 CE

Caityagriha (Cave 3) Kanheri Early to Later Andhra c 75 BCE - 200 CE

Caityagriha Karli Later Andhra c 120 CE

Caityagriha (Cave 4) Kanheri Later Andhra c 100-130 CE

Nahapana Vihara (Cave 10) Nasik Later Andhra 120 CE

Gautamiputra Vihara (Cave 3) Nasik Later Andhra 124 CE

The period between 100 BCE and 100 CE marks a shift in Indian Buddhist culture from an oral form to a written form. Abhidharma was by this time accepted as a third pitika by most schools. At the same time new , anti-Abhidharma Sutras begin to appear, claiming to be lost declamations of the Buddha or of particular Arhats. One result is the development of wider schisms than ever between those who accept one and those who accept the other.

At this same time there are popular savior cults active in the Hellenistic (Mediterranean), Zoroastrian (Iranian), and theistic Brahmanical (South Asian) cultures with which Buddhists shared the northwest of their world. Philosophers and missionaries of the first two compete with the Buddhist missionaries in Western and Central Asia, and even South Asia. The Buddha of the Nikaya schools is gone and can not accept prayers or reciprocate devotion [bhakti] whereas the deities of the others can. For R&J the combination of the new competition and the rise of writing, and the individualism it breeds, thrusted Buddhism toward Mahayana.

Mahayana, the Buddhism of the Bodhisattva path, combines the savior cult with the anti-Abhidharma movement. Abhidharma analysis explained physical and mental events without reference to an abiding self. The anti-Abhidharmists accepted an abiding-self. (glossary) Their name for themselves, Mahayana, was their declaration that their path or vehicle (yana) was the broader one, indeed, the greater one, specifically in relation to that of their opponents, whose way they dubbed Hinayana, the narrower, or lesser path.

There is no generally agreed term for those who kept to the earlier path, as elements of each of the existing schools began calling themselves Mahayanist and them Hinayanists. I am calling them Nikaya Buddhists here (Buddhists of the Schools), a term they sometimes used as a collective themselves, since we need something and I don’t want to use a term they would not accept themselves.

The 2nd to the 7th century saw four sects of importance in India, as listed by the Chinese pilgrim I-ching were Mahasanghika, Sthavira, Sarvastivada, Sammatiya. There were Mahayana and Nikaya segments of each. There was apparently little difference between them in practice, but great difference in motivation.

Mahayanists claimed its course led to supreme, perfect Awakening, while the other only to a selfish Arhatship. The early schools all saw three goals of monastic practice: (1) sravaka (deciple) Arhat (who followed the detailed path of established forms), pratyeka (private, or non-teaching) Buddhas, and (3) Awakened Buddha. Mahayanists held that the third was far superior, because it reached out to all

Further they claimed (following the line of the Mahasanghikas) that innovation was acceptable. And they saw the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni, not as a human who attained enlightenment, but as an apparition of the super mundane Buddha. [The actual Buddha is a transcendental being, and the ones that appear before people are only apparitions the actual Buddha’s create. The true Buddha is a transcendental being: a deity.]

The Mahayanists proceeded to develop (1) the Bodhisattva ideal and the Bodhisattva path and (2) a wide-ranging new pantheon and a theistic cult of superhuman, cosmic Buddhas and Bodhisattva. The logic that made the new developments possible is simple enough. If one is open to innovation, based on past precedent and believes the Buddha not to be a single human experience, but a cosmic expression that can continue to function, then one can accept new developments to be as authentic as past ones.

Mahayanists produced a series of new Sutras. These are composed in the pan-Indian elite language of Sanskrit, rather than regional vernaculars (Prakrits), like the previous texts. These depict surrealistic locals, mind-boggling dimensions, and dazzling, apparitional displays. This transcends the materialism of the earlier texts.

They criticize Abhidharma for describing only conventional reality. Eventually they criticize Nikaya Buddhists as being less capable than even Mahayana laymen (as in the Vimalikirti Nrdesa). New Sutra continue to appear through about the 8th century. (This split parallels a comparable one among contemporary Brahmanical philosophers, between the conservative, Mimamsa and the more liberal, Vaisesika schools, in the 2nd century.) It is hard not to connect this striking split in Buddhism with the Buddha’s early noted claim that half a millennium after the paranirvana the dharma will decay severely and that a thousand years later it will more or less cease to be remembered.

From the second century on Buddhist authors were also publishing texts under their own names. These were called Shastras (treatises). The first historical reference to Mahayana comes in Chinese texts of the 2nd century. It comes at the time of the Kushan Empire’s expansion from Central Asia into north India that links these competing savior cults within a single polity. It may also have significant relationship to the patronage of Kanishka, the greatest of the Kushan kings and the one after Ashoka most highly respect in Buddhist lore. Mahayana reached it height in India in the northwest, Gandhara, in the 4th century period during which Fa Hsien passed through.

Shunyata Teaching of Emptiness

Early Mahayana texts are largely concerned with converting (they would say "freeing") those of the Abhidharma mind-set away from their clinging to a practical system for awakening. That is, the traditional path of meditations and focus on the Noble 8-Fold Path. However different, each text approached this by centering on the doctrine of Shunyata (emptiness).

In the Nikaya Sutra Pitaka shunyata already had two meanings. 1) it is a mode of pure perception, in which nothing is added or subtracted from data perceived. The highest example of this being "nirvana as experienced in the present life." (M. 121) And it is 2) "the lack of self or anything pertaining to a self in the six senses and their objects." (S. XXXV.85) That is, the Abhidharmist contention that there is no abiding self.

To this the early Mahayanists added the post-Paranirvana development of shunya, that can be traced in Panini’s fourth-century BCE use of it, as an emptiness that is pregnant due to its situation in relation to another concept, like the potential of a term to have a suffix, even when it doesn’t have one. Which was followed slightly-later, by the mathematicians adoption of this same shunya as the zero, place holder, in their creation of the decimal system.

The early Mahayana claim was that the Nikaya Buddhists still held a hidden notion of self, which Mahayana’s shunyata transcended. Where the Abhidharma fled samsara, while seeing it as "essentially real." Mahayana faced it as essentially empty and therefore capable of being transcended from any position.

The Prajna-paramita (Perfection of Wisdom) Sutras portrayed the Buddha and its disciples as rejecting conventional Sutra Pitika teachings. Nothing was bound by samsara, they said, so nothing was freed by nirvana.

Nagarjuna’s Madhyamika (c 150-250 CE) refuted Abhidharma on its own terms as an inadequate description of reality. Though it is not at all necessary that Nagarjuna was a Mahayanist. He never mentions Prajnaparamita Sutras or the Bodhisattva ideal. Its importance later comes out in its use in the Lotus, Vimalakirti-nirdesha, and Shrimala Sutras, which are called "emptiness Sutras."

Shunyavadins refer to the Buddha’s teachings as "skillful means" and only "provisional truth." Since the goal is strictly therapeutic, not philosophical, even lies can be tolerated. This even applies to the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eight-fold Path and dependent co-arising. Even distinctions so fundamental, earlier, such as monastic/lay and male/female are called illusory or empty. Yet by contrast any action motivated by compassion is accepted, even if it breaks other rules. (This last went so far as to become the basis for the Tantrism that was the third great path, beyond Mahayana itself.)

In the later emptiness Sutras, "emptiness, viewed as a perceptual mode, [was turned] into a metaphysical absolute, termed the Dharmakaya." Dharmakaya (the Dharma body) in the Nikaya texts refers to the Buddha’s teachings. In Mahayana it is taken to be a metaphysical absolute and either (1) the potential for Awakening or (2) the source from which all things arise.

"Because some of the Sutras and later theoreticians...bordered on philosophical idealism—denying the reality of objects outside of the mind—the school developed other names as well: Vijnanavada (Proponents of Consciousness); ...Vijnanamatra (Consciousness-Only)..."& etc.

An important concept developed by the Yogacarins was that of the tathagata-garbha (the womb of tathagata-hood). Tathagata is the term the Buddha used to speak of himself, after his enlightenment. Literally it means the one who has come this way. Garbha can refer to either the womb or the seed in the womb. In a well known image it was used to refer to the calyx of the lotus, and the embryo lotus held within the calyx.

Prajnaparamita (Perfection of Wisdom) was thus already referred to as the womb containing all Buddhas. The Tathagata-garbha was now used to designate the innate potential for Buddhahood present in all beings. This is a potential that is covered over or held by defilements in ordinary individuals, or only partly purified of defilements in Bodhisattva and pure only in Buddhas.

Yogacara Sutras describe the tathagata-garbha as analogous to the Buddha in a faded lotus, or honey covered by bees, gold in ore, and also a precious statue covered with dirt, or a Buddha-image wrapped in rags. The images all have to do with a process of growth or purification by which the Tathagata is released from the Tathagata-garbha.

The Tathagata-garbha was now equated with the Dharmakaya, the Dharmabody of the Buddha as the transcendental, cosmic source of Awakening, in what was called the three-body, or Trikaya, doctrine.

The Yogacara school came close to being an extreme idealistic phenomenology, denying all objects outside of the mind. It produced the trikaya doctrine, to account for (1) the historical Buddha, (2) the transcendental Buddhas of the Mahasanghikas and (3) the Awakening potential of all beings. It was a system of three levels, each of the lower levels emanating from the higher: the Nirmanakaya from the Sambhogakaya and the Sambhogakaya from the Dharmakaya.

Amitabha in the Sukhavati Vyuha paradise, is seen as Nirmanakaya by lesser beings and Sambhogakaya by the Bodhisattvas.

This theory rises at the same time as monasteries began building "perfumed chambers" in which Buddha-images were placed, and in which "in certain senses" the Buddha was said and thought to reside. These images served as a focus for monastic and lay devotees wishing to earn merit from direct gifts to the Buddha. (According to R&J)

Yogacara theory served both philosophical logic and explanation for the multiplicity cosmology of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas in the Mahayana pantheon. The Dharmakaya was a purified store consciousness, perfected experience, the womb of the Tathagatha. To some this seemed to be a Buddhist version of the Upanisadic equation of the individual self and the universal Brahman.

In some sense it was believed by some that the Buddha actually did reside in Buddha-images and within these perfumed chambers in some fashion, and thus that they could receive this devotion (bhakti). This was the result to an important extent of a pan-Indian movement to recognize personal devotion to personified savior as a route to salvation equal to the long established hegemonic routes of ritual and yoga. We can see the same development within the orthodox Brahmanical traditions in the theistic Hinduism, that replaces the Vedic Indra, Agni and Brahma, with the Vishnu, Shiva and Devi of popular worship.

This was by now clearly a Buddhist world of many different abiding monastic institutions. There were the four major Nikaya schools noted by the Chinese pilgrims: Mahasanghika, Sthavira, Sarvastivada, and Sammatiya and as many as thirteen others. And now there were also a growing variety of Mahayana schools as well, the Yogacarins, Shunyavadins, and others. Madhyamikas dominated the "university" of Nalanda in the north, Yogacarins and Sammatiyas the university of Valabhi in the west.

According to the Chinese pilgrims of the seventh century and later Tibetans, the Nikaya sects maintained their dominance in India until Buddhism there came to an abrupt end c1300 CE. Particularly notable were the Sammatiya school in Valabhi, in the west, the Sarvastivada, in Gandhara and Kashmir in the north, and the Theravada of Lanka, in the far south. At Nalanda in the Ganga Valley the Madhyamaka were in command. Kanishka sponsored a Fourth Great Council under the leadership of the Sarvastivadins.

Still a majority of Nikaya Buddhists simply ignored the Mahayana teachings because they were apparently after the teaching of Shakyamuni. They called the Mahayanists Vaitulika (expansionists), for their adding to the canon, or illusionists, for their idealist claiming that material reality was an illusion.

Two major first century phenomena have a place here. One was the turn toward Sanskrit, the elite literary language of orthodox Brahmans. All the Nikaya texts were now translated into Sanskrit, a phenomena so pervasive that when Buddhaghosa went looking for Nikaya texts in their original vernaculars, he had to go to Sri Lanka to find any, and even these were long out of use.

The second can be seen in the elaborate first century CE poem on the life of Siddhartha, by the Bahusrutya (a subgroup of the Mahasanghikas) Ashvaghosa: the Buddha Charita. This enlarged literary representation of the person of the Buddha came at the same moment that the visual representation of the Buddha emerged into stone.

The biggest shift between Nikaya and Mahayana Buddhism is the reversal from a therapeutic practice built around the insights of a man who was taken to have discovered the secret of how to live in the world with the least pain and how not to have to go on with an endless cycle of rebirth, to a theistic cult of a cosmic principle which incarnated itself form of a man.

Early Buddhism subordinated gods to the Buddha, who himself was essentially a man, albeit a very special one with a number of supernatural powers. The Mahayana Buddhism while following many of the same themes shifts substantially to become a theistic religion. And this certainly had an impact on the contemporaneous shift from the aniconic narrative art of early Buddhism to the iconic Buddha imagery of the second half millennium.

A generation ago Buddhologists saw the split between Nikaya and Mahayana as a clear eruption of one great branch from another. By the same token Buddhist art was cleanly divided between the aniconic imagery of the Nikaya and the iconic imagery of Mahayana. Today we recognize a far more complex picture. Among the earliest Buddha representations, we now count many from Nikaya sites in Sri Lanka. Nikaya Buddhists continue this tradition today.

So what is our more developed vision today? We know from more detailed study of Theravada societies today and of the voluminous records of earlier ones that there was never a prescription against Buddha images or even against worshipping deities other than the Buddha. Unlike the Navayana Buddhists, whose very oath incorporates a rejection of all deities, Nikaya Buddhism doesn’t deny the power of the Brahmanical deities of the surrounding society. Indeed they lean on the prestige of those deities by incorporating them in the Buddhist narrative, through their continual raising up of their power before they subordinated it to the Buddha. It was thus not such an immense jump for some from the therapeutic of Theravada to the bhakti devotion to the Buddha’s being. Even the stupa brings the Buddha’s remains into worship, as objects of respect of some sort....at least for some. What we see at Sanchi in the stupa darshan relief is apparently worship. Indeed the very concept of relic preservation moves in that direction.

So, what was the explanation of the Buddha’s image coming into popular use? It certainly had something to do with the general Indian tendency toward devotional religion (bhakti) at this very moment. Many of the Buddha’s royal and other wealthy supporters indeed were followers of these cults as well as Buddhism. If R&J are right to say the Mahayanists existed inside each of the Nikaya community then it was more a question of who within any particular community let Buddha images in, and who didn’t, than which particular community did it first.

We also need to remember that what has survived is more a matter of what got into permanent materials than simply what was made first. The vast majority of what was made was undoubtedly in vulnerable materials like mud, plaster and paint that disintegrated long ago. Only the imagery made for the elite could be made in more or less permanent materials of stone and metal.

The Nikaya tradition itself preserves tales of Buddha representations made during the lifetime of the historical Buddha. In the first case a painted silhouette of its shadow case against a screen, in the second case a carving in sandalwood.

The best we can say is that regular manufacture of Buddha-representations emerge in stone record at more or less the same time and likely from the same theistic impetus that brought us Mahayana Buddhism. Accompanying such philosophical developments as the concepts of "skillful means" and the Trikaya doctrine among the monks, came theistic bhakti. The latter, perhaps, more closely connected to the interests of the upasaka (lay followers) than the meditation-practicing Bhikkhus, whose multiple affirmations included the preclusion of many aspects of worship, such as the offering of songs and _____ to either stupas or the Buddha.

The Buddhist emblematic imagery of Maurya times alludes to the ideology and lore of Nikaya Buddhism. The aniconic narrative imagery of the Shunga and Early Andhra period, at Bhaja, Bharhut, and Sanchi seems as clearly to be limited to the same relatively naturalistic tradition of imagery found in the Nikaya canon, particularly the tale of Sakyamuni, in the past lives, told in the Jataka, and of life of the Bodhisattva Siddhartha, and of the Awakened Buddha’s passage toward Paranirvana.

Now, in the Later Andhra period, from sometime in the first century we begin to find depictions of these same narratives in which the Buddha is represented as a person, not a place-holding space or symbol. And then something even more revolutionary, an icon of the Buddha, consecrated for some sort of devotional worship.

Cave 2 at Kanheri designiates an uncoordinated collection of Arhat stupas and vihara cells, from the first century BCE to the first CE, cut out of the rock at the back of a natural overhang. There are three relatively plain, geometric stupas, with inscriptions from the second century CE. There are also figurative panels on the wall behind one of the stupas, added sometimg in the fifth century CE.

The grand Chaitya, Cave 3, at Kanheri was begun a good deal earlier than Karli’s chaitya, which it now resembles, and from which its later phases seem to have been influenced. The cave was originally roughed-out sometime after Bhaja’s chaitya (c 75 BCE), as it has a similarly plain octagonal pillars and stupa, but retained the stone for a facade wall that was not yet the practice at the time of Bhaja’s creation. It was undertaken for two Khatiya brothers, Gajasena and Gajamita, in honor of their deceased parents and for the accrual of merit to various members of their family, each of whom they listed along with their relationship.

The change from the plain, Shunga period, beginning to the Later Andhra finish was the result of a second campaign, sponsored by theras (monks of 10 years standing), Achala, Gahala, Dhamapala and others. The excavation was executed by bhadata Bodhika, with the help of stone cutters, polisher and other craftsmen. It can be dated in relation to its decorative style, the paleography of the inscription, and the references to the monk Dhamapala to the first quarter of the second century, more so (c 125 CE).

This brought a change from the simple octagonal pillars to Later Andhra styled pillars, with stepped pot bases and inhabited capitals in the finishing of the cave. There are also great figure panels, in a vein similar to those found at Karli in the verandah screen of the entrance. The form of the outer screen shows what was intended but now in ruins at Karli. It was a bit later, as indicated by the inscription on the right doorjamb of the entrance. It appears to come from the reign of Gautamiputra (Sri-Yajna) Satakarni (c 200 CE), at the time of the third phase, that finished the courtyard and its emblematic pillars.

It was at this time that the pillars were finished, with one of the earliest images of a Buddha to be preserved in western India. This image is a small figure on the base of the southern stambha. It is flanked by figures in more elaborate dress, attendants who might be Bodhisattva. What little can be see of this early Buddha image shows a sanghati that is blown back against the figure revealing the shape of the body beneath. Both hands are raised, as typical with the first standing Buddha images, the left holding the robe and the other in abhaya mudra.

Thus, what several specialists have considered the earliest Buddha representation found in western, or perhaps all India, appears as a minor addition to the second or third stage of a Nikaya Buddhist monument.

Nor was this the end of work on this, the most spectacular monument at a site close to one of the western seaboard’s major trading ports, and unquestionably an important gateway to India for foreign Buddhists making pilgrimage to holy sites and great centers of learning in Buddhism’s homeland. The fifth century saw the addition of a good number of figurative images of the Buddha, including two of spectacular hight.

Karli was the largest chaitya hall to be constructed, and its figurative imagery the most spectacular of its time. So it is not surprising that its prestige would make it a model for imagery of the years immediately following.

There is an inscription on the harmika that records that this was a stupa for the thera, Bhadamita Dhammapala, and that it was made for him by a lady Sivapalatanika. Both the stupa and letter style fit the early second century.

The presence of several preaching Buddha images, cut into the medhi, below the vedika, seems surely to be additions to the original design. If their proportions and situation don’t guarantee this, their subtractive nature, fully cut below the surface perimeter of the finished medhi appears to.

How soon after the original creation was the figurative images of Buddhas added to the non-iconic representation of the paranirvana? The inscriptions and style of figurative images of the Buddha were added to the great chaitya in the [late] fifth century. But the actual date isn’t as important for us as the broader point that one image may be developed into another as the creed and its accouterments continue to develop.

[Nagaraju 197-8+]

Cave 10 is a large vihara of 18 separate cells, also called Nahapana’s Cave, because of the inscriptions of his relatives dated in his 42 regnal year. This would be precisely 120 CE. It facade pillars are of the same general Later Andhra type found at Karli and the later sections of Kanheri 3. A feature of greater interest, for us, is the relief of a stupa carved upon the wall between two cells, at the very center of the rear wall.

A similar relief-stupa is found in the same location on the contemporaneous Gautamiputra Cave, another large vihara, of 19 cells, number 3 at the site. Inscriptions here date the already occupied vihara to the 19th year of Gautamiputra Satakarni, equivalent to 124 CE.

Since these reliefs are finely finished and raised above the level of the surrounding walls, rather than sunk into them, they would seem to be intended by the original construction. In each case they show stupas flanked by female figures fanning them with chauri fly whisks. That is, they are seen as under worship.

Here, then, we find the stupa as an object of worship, either for the Paranirvana it most specifically symbolizes, or for the Buddha, whose Paranirvana it was, placed into the vihara.

[Nagaraju]