Sacred Texts

Despite the confident pronouncement by the participants at the first council that the canon was closed, several centuries after the passing of the Buddha new texts began to appear in India that carried the title of "sutra," purportedly spoken by the Buddha during his lifetime. These were part of a new movement that referred to itself as "Mahayana" (Greater vehicle) and that characterized its opponents as "Hinayana" (Lesser vehicle). Proponents of the Mahayana sutras claimed that their texts superseded those of their rivals and were of "definitive meaning" (nitartha), while those of the previous canons were relegated to the status of "interpretable meaning" (neyartha). The opponents of Mahayana, for their part, categorically rejected these new texts as forgeries, and pointed out that they differed significantly from those of the earlier canon and contained new doctrines and practices that were not attested in the earlier texts. The Mahayanists responded by claiming that their sutras had been taught by the Buddha but were only revealed to his most advanced disciples.

Some Mahayana sutras set out hermeneutical principles that could be used to differentiate which texts are definitive and which are interpretable. According to the Teaching of Aksayamati Sutra (Aksayamati-nirdesa-sutra), which became normative for the Middle Way (Madhyamaka) school, the differentiating factor is doctrinal content: those texts that discuss the final nature of phenomena are definitive, while all others are of interpretable meaning. The final nature of phenomena is said to be their emptiness (sunyata) of inherent existence (svabhava).

Another hermeneutical schema was propounded by the Sutra Explaining the Thought (Samdhinirmocana-sutra), which became the primary scriptural source for the Yogic Practice (Yogacara) school. In this text, the Buddha is presented as claiming that he taught his doctrines in three cycles, or "wheels of doctrine" (dharma-cakra). The "first wheel" contains basic Buddhist doctrines that are contained in the early canon, which were taught for beginners and were not definitive. In the "second wheel" the literal interpretation of these doctrines was rendered problematic by the declaration that all phenomena—including Buddhist teachings and practices—are empty of inherent existence, and so the doctrines of the early canon lack the privileged truth status that conservative Buddhists had attributed to them. The "third wheel," represented by the Sutra Explaining the Thought, differentiates interpretable and definitive teachings and provides hermeneutical guidelines by which Buddhists (or at least those who accept them as normative) can differentiate the two.

The canonical situation of Indian Buddhism became even more confusing in later centuries when a new group of texts began to appear, again claiming to have been spoken by the Buddha. These were called "tantras" and contained significant innovations in doctrine and practice, although the basic path was that of the Mahayana. Like the Mahayana sutras before them, they claimed to supersede previous teachings and to represent the final "word of the Buddha" on doctrine and practice.