FiveSkandhas wrote: ↑Thu Aug 05, 2021 8:31 amDoes anyone know the earliest reliable date for Mahayana to actually be considered a single, seperate phenomenon by doxologists? When did the use of the word itself emerge, and with what source(s)?
The question then would be: separate from what?
Based upon the prevalent scholarship, it seems accepted that Mahāyānists and non-Mahāyānists practiced in the same monasteries. I am not sure Mahāyānists ever "threw out" non-Mahāyānists, and this may be the point to keep in mind. In Sri Lanka Theravāda (which is an ordination lineage and not a doctrinal lineage as thought of today) monasteries had Mahāyāna sūtras and monastics, but were officially rejected in the tenth century CE according to Jonathan Walters in his article "Mahāyāna Theravāda and the Origins of the Mahāvihāra." The same seems to be the case in South East Asia, where there were Mahāyāna-Vajrayāna traditions going for quite a while until the cleansed Sri Lankan Mahāvihāra sect was imposed (e.g. by the Mon-Pyu in Burma). We could very well say that Chinese Buddhism is the same kind of mixed Buddhism that existed in India—no purge took ever took place, so the Mahāyāna remained, but the superiority claimed by the Mahāyāna sūtras as well as their overwhelming quantity compared to the size of the āgama canon probably meant that anyone who practiced non-Mahāyāna was just drowned out. The fact that there is now the appearance of "sects" identical to ordination lineages like Theravāda that are either Mahāyāna or Śrāvakayāna is an accident of history which obscures the character of of Buddhism as it existed in India.
I think western scholarship has been working on so many presuppositions about the character of the Mahāyāna in relation to "sects" that we lost sight of how things would have looked on the ground.
The earliest manuscript source for the term Mahāyāna is the Gandhāran
Aṣṭasāhasrikā fragments (c. 50 CE), which are also the earliest South Asian manuscripts of any kind. Drewes makes the good point that the term as used to refer to sūtras is later than the usage of the term vaipulya, but this is different from its usage as a doctrinal category as it appears in the text of the
Aṣṭasāhasrikā.