Page:The Development of Mahayana Buddhism - The Monist 1914.pdf/2

566 further, we can even invent a new method of division, and call one the progressives and the other the conservatives.

Taking all in all, however, it seems to me that the division of Mahâyâna and Hînayâna Buddhism is preferable to all the rest from the point of view of our knowledge of Buddhism. Of course, this way of dividing Buddhism has its historical odium, which is most desirable for modern scholars of Buddhism to avoid. Except for this latter objection, the term Mahâyâna” is comprehensive and definite enough to include all those schools of Buddhism in which the ideal of Bodhisattvahood is upheld in preference to the attainment of Arahatship, and whose geographical distribution covers not only the northern parts of India but east of them as well. Let us here, therefore, use the term Mahâyâna” more for the sake of convenience than anything else, until we shall have studied Buddhism in all its diverse aspects, historic, dogmatic, and ritualistic, when we shall be able to understand Buddhism far better than we do now.

The object of my present article is to expound briefly what in my view constitutes the essential characteristics of Mahâyâna Buddhism in contradistinction to Hînayâna Buddhism.

The character of Mahâyâna Buddhism can be expressed in the one word, speculative. Buddhism generally teaches three forms of discipline: moral (sīla), contemplative (dhyâna), and intellectual (prajñā) ; and of these the last seems to have been particularly emphasized by the Mahâyâna Buddhists, while the moral discipline has become the chief feature of Southern Buddhism, so called,in fact, to such an extent that most Western scholars of Buddhism, whose principal source of information is the Pâli Tipitaka, are apt to take Buddhism for no more nor less than a system of ethical culture, which, therefore, cannot be called a religion in the same sense as is Christianity. While the