Meaning of "Mahayana" and the meaninglessness of "Buddhism"

THE ORIGIN OF THE TERM ‘MAHĀYĀNA’ (THE GREAT VEHICLE) AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO THE ĀGAMAS* JOSEPH WALSER

While there is a growing consensus that the term “Mahāyāna” did not refer to a single set of doctrines, practices or propositions, the fact remains that at a certain point in history a set of authors gravitated toward the term “Mahāyāna” (trailing a penumbra of affiliated terms such as śreṣṭhayāna, bodhisat tvayāna, tathāgatayāna, agrayāna, ekayāna, etc.) as a kind of brand name for their project. Presumably there was a reason for the choice – or at least some reason why this moniker stuck and others did not. What did the term mean to those who fi rst used it? We have become so accustomed to hearing about the “Great Vehicle,” that few have stopped to consider that there may be something odd about identifying a religion with what is essentially a carriage. In this paper I argue that early Mahāyānists may well have adopted the term from a non-technical usage found in passages from the Jāṇussoṇisūtra of the Saṃyuktāgama and the Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra of the Dīrghāgama.

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While the term may not have been as important at the beginning of the movement as it would become later, and not all texts that we would consider Mahāyānist even use the term, 2the fact remains that the term is there, scat-tered among our earliest translations of Mahāyāna texts, its mean-ing largely taken for granted. Indeed, somewhat surprisingly, there are no Mahāyāna texts that introduce the term as if its audience had never heard it before

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Welcome! ewk comment: So the debate about there being a "Mahayana Buddhism", when neither mahayana nor buddhism could be said to refer to any possible set of "doctrines, practices, or propositions", is more or less over.

Put less academically, the blubbering objection to Zen Masters defining themselves in direct rejection of a label like "Mahayana Buddhism of the 20th Century" is nothing more than the crybabying of people who *never had an argument to martial in the first place".

Who can we blame?

How many times does "Mahayana" come up in the 1,000 year Zen record?

Huangbo: Not to see that all methods of following the Way are ephemeral is samsaric Dharma It is because you are not that sort of man that you insist on a thorough study of the methods established by people of old for gaining knowledge on the conceptual level. Chih Kung also said: If you do not meet a transcendental teacher, you will have swallowed the Mahayana medicine in vain!

Submitted March 17, 2022 at 06:56AM by ewk https://ift.tt/2Sqfh5x