Mahayana: References & Edit History

A large number of translations of fundamental Mahayana sutras have been published. A few of the most important are Robert A.F. Thurman (trans.), The Holy Teaching of Vimalakirti (1976, reissued 1991); Burton Watson (trans.), The Lotus Sutra (1993), also available in an abridged edition, The Essential Lotus (2002); Thomas Cleary (trans.), The Flower Ornament Sutra Scripture: A Translation of the Avatamsaka Sutra, 3 vol. (1984–87); Garma C.C. Chang, A Treasury of Mahāyāna Sūtras: Selections from the Mahāratnakāta Sūtra (1983); Edward Conze (trans.), The Large Sutra on Perfect Wisdom with the Divisions of the Abhisamayālankāra, 2 vol. (1961–64, reissued 1984); and Luis O. Gómez (trans.), The Land of Bliss: The Paradise of the Buddha of Measureless Light: Sanskrit and Chinese Versions of the Sukhā Vatī Vyū ha Sutras (1996). Étienne Lamotte, Le Traité de la grande Vertu de Sagesse, 5 vol. (1944–80), is a partial translation with exhaustive annotations of the Da Zhidu-lun, a massive 5th century Indo-Chinese encyclopedic compilation of Mahayana doctrine from a Madhyamika perspective.

Mahayana Buddhism is a vast topic, and the amount of scholarship correspondingly enormous. Nevertheless, few reliable surveys exist in Western languages. An introduction strongest on the philosophical traditions of Madhyamika and Yogacara is Paul Williams, Mahāyāna Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations (1989, reprinted 1996). An ambitious attempt to survey later Indian developments—which, however, suffers from a tendency to look at India through Tibetan eyes—is David Snellgrove, Indo-Tibetan Buddhism: Indian Buddhists and Their Tibetan Successors (1987, reissued 2002). Despite the fact that some of his hypotheses regarding the origins of the Mahayana have been disproved, a very useful discussion of earlier Indian Buddhism remains Hirakawa Akira, A History of Indian Buddhism from Śākyamuni to Early Mahāyāna, trans. and ed. by Paul Groner (1990; originally published in Japanese, 2 vol., 1974–79). The technical literature of Mahayana philosophical traditions has received a large amount of scholarly attention, but much of this work is difficult to penetrate. A very good collection of papers is Gadjin M. Nagao, Mādhyamika and Yogācāra: A Study of Mahāyāna Philosophies, ed. and trans. from Japanese by Leslie S. Kawamura (1991).