The Dawn of the Bodhisattva Path: Studies In A Religious Ideal of Ancient Indian Buddhists With Particular Emphasis on the Earliest Extant Perfection of Wisdom Sutra
By the second century, the bodhisattva ideal was a central organizing principle in the religious lives of some Buddhist groups. This dissertation explores the oldest extant literature dedicated to bodhisattva practice, in particular Lokaksema's second-century Chinese translation of the Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines, i.e., the Daoxing jing. Western scholars have tended to approach this sutra as a philosophical text, overlooking what it reveals about the historical community(s) that composed it. This dissertation approaches the Daoxing jing as a field for textual archeology in an attempt to understand the religious world view of the early bodhisattva movement.
Departing from recent understandings which assign the early bodhisattva movements and sutras to "Mahayana Buddhism", this dissertation argues that popular understandings of the "Mahayana" create inappropriate contexts for these communities and scriptures. As the evidence suggests that the bodhisattva movement was a pan-Buddhist phenomena, an overview is presented of the diverse literature which discusses the ideal, i.e., literature belonging to both sides of the so-called Mahayana-Hinayana divide.
A chapter is devoted to uncovering the origins of the early bodhisattva sutras. Evidence suggests that revelation--a religious practice common in many religions but under-appreciated in studies of Buddhism--played an important role in the production of these sutras.
The bodhisattva ideal is not systematically discussed in the Daoxing jing. Even so, significant differences exist from historically later and better-known ideas of the bodhisattva. For example, the Daoxing jing does not associate the aspiration for Buddhahood (bodhicitta) with compassion.
The Daoxing jing exhibits enough concern with the division between those bodhisattvas who are predicted to Buddhahood and those who have not that prediction appears to have played an important role within the authorial community of the text. As such, understanding the religious function of prediction contributes to our reconstruction of the world view within which the early bodhisattva ideal was formulated. We find that this world view was predicated on cultural beliefs about rebirth, visionary and revelatory experiences, and myths of events far distant in time and space.
