Sautrāntika

The Sautrāntika were an early Buddhist school generally believed to be descended from the Sthavira nikāya by way of their immediate parent school, the Sarvāstivādins. Their name means literally "those who rely upon the sutras", and indicated their rejection of the Abhidharma texts of other early Buddhist schools.

The Sarvāstivādins sometimes referred to them as the Dārṣṭāntika school, meaning "those who utilize the method of examples". This latter name may have been a pejorative label. It is also possible that the name 'Dārṣṭāntika' identifies a predecessor tradition, or another related, but distinct, doctrinal position; the exact relationship between the two terms is unclear. Charles Willemen identifies the Sautrāntika as a Western branch of the Sarvāstivādins, active in the Gandhara area, who split from the Sarvāstivādins sometime before 200 CE, when the Sautrāntika name emerged. Other scholars are less confidant of a specific identification for the Sautrāntika; Nobuyoshi Yamabe calls specifying the precise identity of the Sautrāntika "one of the biggest problems in current Buddhist scholarship." The founding of the Sautantrika school is attributed to the elder Kumaralata (c. 1st century), author of a "collection of drstanta" (drstantapankti) named Kalpanamanditika. The Sautantrikas were sometimes also called "disciples of Kumaralata".

According to the Abhidharmakośa of Vasubandhu, the Sautrāntika held the view that there may be many buddhas simultaneously, otherwise known as the doctrine of contemporaneous buddhas.

The Sautrāntika differed from their parent school, the Sarvāstivādins on matters of ontology. While the Sarvāstivādin abhidharma described a complex system in which past, present, and future phenomena are all held to have some form of their own existence, the Sautrāntika subscribed to a doctrine of "extreme momentariness" that held that only the present moment existed. They seem to have regarded the Sarvāstivādin position as a violation of the basic Buddhist principle of impermanence). The Sarvāstivādin abhidharma also broke down human experience in terms of a variety of underlying phenomena (a view similar to that held by the modern Theravadin abhidhamma); the Sautrāntika believed that experience could not be differentiated in this manner.

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