Versions of Buddhism

One of the hypotheses on the migration of the Sherpas suggests they were expelled from the Sichuan prairies for religious reasons. The Sherpas were Buddhists of the Mahayana variety, more secular and less dogmatic than the Theravada branch. For fourteen hundred years, both schools coexisted in relative harmony: they shared their monasteries and their reading of the sutras. But at some point in the fifteenth century, and somewhere in China, the factions radicalised. The Mahayana Buddhists believed that it was possible to democratise Nirvana. That just about anyone could achieve a state of enlightenment. Like Zen doctrine, which owes much of its cosmological framework to it, the Mahayana interpreted Buddhism as method rather than as worship. The Theravada, meanwhile, had a more restrictive idea of the proper path: you’d need to lead a monastic life, in absolute asceticism, and maintain a monomaniacal dedication to the precepts of Siddhartha Gautama in order to complete your journey. Wisdom, then, for the Theravada: in the hands of a religious caste, exclusive, hierarchical. There was no room for the uninitiated. Consequently, and to summarise, the Mahayana were cut off in the monasteries and cast out of society. Marginalised in Sichuan, they began heading west, into the mountains – into the Himalayas.