dian
Buddhism.

Although the record of the Mahayana in literature and art is clear and
even brilliant, it is not easy either to trace its rise or connect its
development with other events in India. Its annals are an interminable
list of names and doctrines, but bring before us few living
personalities and hence are dull. They are like a record of the
Christian Church's fight against Arians, Monophysites and Nestorians
with all the great figures of Byzantine history omitted or called in
question. Hence I fear that my readers (if I have any) may find these
chapters repellent, a mist of hypotheses and a catalogue of ancient
paradoxes. I can only urge that if the history of the Mahayana is
uncertain, its teaching fanciful and its scriptures tedious, yet it
has been a force of the first magnitude in the secular history and art
of China, Japan and Tibet and even to-day the most metaphysical of its
sacred books, the Diamond Cutter, has probably more readers than Kant
and Hegel.

Since the early history of the Mahayana is a matter for argument
rather than precise statement, it will perhaps be best to begin with
some account of its doctrines and literature and proceed afterwards to
chronology. I may, however, mention that general tradition connects it
with King Kanishka and asserts that the great doctors Asvaghosha and
Nagarjuna lived in and immediately after his reign. The attitude of
Kanishka and of the Council which he summoned towards the Mahayana is
far from clear and I shall say something about this difficult subject
below. Unfortunately his date is not beyond dispute for while a
considerable consensus of opinion fixes his accession at about 78
A.D., some scholars place it earlier and others in the second century
A.D.[4] Apart from this, it appears established that the
Sukhavati-vyuha which is definitely Mahayanist was translated into
Chinese between 147 and 186 A.D. We may assume that it was then
already well known and had been composed some time before, so that,
whatever Kanishka's date may have been, Mahayanist doctrines must have
been in existence about the time of the Christian era, and perhaps
considerably earlier. Naturally no one date like a reign or a council
can be selected to mark the beginning of a great school. Such a body
of doctrine must have existed piecemeal and unauthorized before it was
collected and recognized and some tenets are older than others.
Enlarging I-Ching's definition we may find in the Ma