Coëmgenu wrote:Malcolm wrote:Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna in SE Asia were based on Indian Buddhism spreading to the east. Their scriptures were in Sanskirt, as is the case with Mahāyāna that spread to China and Tibet. It has never been the case that the scriptures of any branch of Theravada were based in Sanskrit.
These traditions venerated both Sanskrit and Pali material, and by "these traditions", I refer specifically to the Abhayagirivihāra and Yogāvacara traditions.
The Abhayagiri tradition was destroyed completely in the 12th century, at least one of its monks came to study in Sakya, Tibet. It has no influence on S.E. Asia after this date. It is anachronistic to term them Theravadins as well.
With respect to the kind of Buddhism present in SE before the
Theravada hegemony:
A similar situation must have obtained throughout south-east Asian Buddhism, for we know that the areas of Thailand, Burma, and Cambodia where Theravāda now flourishes were formerly dominated by Mahāyāna, or Sanskritic Śrāvakayāna Buddhism. We note the widespread occurrence of the cult of Upagupta throughout this region, which is totally absent from Sri Lanka, and wonder whether this gives a hint as to the kind of Buddhism prevalent before the Theravāda orthodoxy. According to I-Tsing, in the lands on the eastern boundaries of India all four major schools flourished, while in the island regions the Mūlasarvāstivāda predominated.
When these areas ‘converted’ to Theravāda (which mainly occurred around the 11th-12th Centuries), it is impossible that all the monks took new ordinations. Of course, the official histories will assert that when the religion was reformed that all the monks conformed to the new system.But the practicalities of this are absurd: sending city administration monks wandering through 1000s of miles of tiger-stalked, bandit-infested, ghost-haunted jungle tracks seeking out countless little villages, trying to persuade senior monks that their ordination is invalid or improper and must be done again, all on the basis of some political compromise in a far-distant capital, in a region of ever-shifting borders and allegiances. As history this is sheer fantasy, and the reality must have been that the reforms would directly affect only certain central m onasteries.
The Yogāvacara tradition is a syncretic tradition with no Indian antecedents or relationship with Vajrayāna at all of the kind we find in Tibet and Japan. We might indeed call it a indigenous tradition, but to call it "Tantric" results from a misunderstanding of what Buddhist tantra is and what tantras are.