It is true, we should concede at the outset, that Buddhism is not a “historical religion” in the sense that applies to the monotheistic faiths of the Semitic world. What the Buddha discovered in his experience of enlightenment, so the Buddhist scriptures tell us, was not any new revelation irrupting into the world for the first time, but a timeless truth about the nature of reality, identical to the truth discovered by all other enlightened sages before him. Thus, even the central event of Buddhist mythology —the Buddha’s experience of illumination under the Bodhi tree —is not viewed as a decisive historical event in the sense that Jews, Christians, or Muslims might use to speak of the receipt of the ten commandments by Moses, the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus, or the revelation of the Qur’an to Muhammad. Indeed, it is a central contention of virtually all schools of Buddhism that the Buddha’s experience is by definition repeatable and is accessible (at least in theory) to all human beings.

The agenda in the present study, then—for to raise such a question without facing it oneself would be illegitimate —has been to demonstrate that we will miss (and misunderstand) a great deal of what has gone on in Buddhist history if we assume that this tradition has been indifferent to historical change. On the contrary, it is my contention that the question of “what time it is” has mattered, and at times has mattered very much, to a substantial proportion of Buddhist believers. A major objective of this study has been to demonstrate that there is considerable evidence in the Buddhist canonical literature itself that, far from being concerned only with “timeless realities,” the Buddhist tradition has often paid careful attention to the transitory realities of this earth.

[T]his acute sense of the inability of ordinary human beings living in the Final Age to emulate their spiritual predecessors has led to what would be described, in a Christian context, as “dispensationalism”: that is, the idea that while certain teachings and practices may have been appropriate in an earlier age, we now find ourselves in a completely different era (or “dispensation”) in which a wholly new spiritual repertoire is called for. Thus the arguments set forth by the Japanese Buddhist teacher Hōnen (1133-1212) in favor of discarding all Buddhist scriptures other than those concerning the “original vow” of the Buddha Amitābha (Jpn. Amida) were based on the idea that a fundamentally new age was now in effect. Likewise, while his compatriot Nichiren (1222-1282) argued that his advocacy of chanting the daimoku was fully in accord with the intention of the Buddha Śākyamuni, he was also well aware that this constituted a radically new practice in the eyes of his fellow Buddhists, and he argued for its legitimacy precisely on the basis of such “dispensationalism.”

Thus, while in South, Southeast, and Inner Asia (including Tibet) the threat of the decline and ultimate demise of the Dharma served largely to elicit conformity with the existing tradition and to reinforce the importance of preserving whatever elements of the Dharma still remain, in East Asia a long series of Buddhist leaders —from the Pure Land teacher Tao-ch’o in 6th-century China to the Kamakura reformers of 13th-centuryJapan —found in the idea of mo-fa an incentive to innovation, often leading to the formulation of new religious ideas and practices of striking creativity.

The idea of decline, then, is clearly multivalent and has served a number of seemingly contradictory purposes in Buddhist religious history. Its significance in any given time and place—or for any given individual —will be influenced by a great number of factors, one of the most important of which is the presence, or absence, of a concept of mo-fa. The task of living within a prolonged period of the “Final Dharma” is quite different from that of facing the imminent demise of the Dharma as a whole, and it is hardly surprising that these two prospects should have evoked such different responses.

Our search for the origins of the three-period system has brought us, then, to the following conclusions. The notions of saddharma and saddhanna-pratirūpaka were well established in Indian Mahāyāna literature by the middle of the 2nd century CE at the latest. Meanwhile, the term Paścimakāle (“latter age”) had also entered Indian Buddhist literature, likewise in a Mahāyāna context, as a reference to the period following the death of the historical Buddha. Most often the latter term was used in contexts in which the Buddha was described as recommending the acceptance, preservation, dissemination, and so forth of the sūtra in question during the time after his death, sometimes in conjunction with a discussion of the difficulties that might attend those who do so. By the latter half of the 3rd century CE Buddhist scriptures containing all of these terms were being translated into Chinese by Dharmarakṣa, who appears to have introduced the two vital terms hsiang-fa (as a translation of saddharma-Pratirūpaka) and mo-shih (as a translation of Paścimakāle) into Chinese Buddhist discourse.

Around the same time the notion of two periods in the history of the Buddhist religion (found in such Indian texts as the Lotus Sūtra) was becoming well established in Chinese Buddhist circles. In light of this twofold time system some Chinese Buddhists began to interpret the term mo-shih, which would naturally be understood in Chinese as “final age,” as the name of a third such period. Based on this understanding, certain Buddhist translators (of whom the most influential, and probably the earliest, was Kumārajīva) began to use the term mo-fa as an occasional substitute for mo-shih, thus bringing the latter into greater symmetry with its “predecessors,” the periods of cheng-fa and hsiang-fa, respectively. Having thus entered the scriptural corpus, the term mo-fa took on a life of its own, and Chinese commentators undertook with enthusiasm the task of describing the nature and duration of this anticipated third period. That they chose for its duration the quintessentially Chinese figure of 10,000 years (with its underlying implication of “an eternity”) demonstrates that they were free from any constraints encountered in Indian documents, for while mo-shih (Skt. paścimakāle) is often described as comprising the “latter five hundred years,” the newly coined term mo-fa was subject to no such restrictions. Likewise it reveals their profound sense of optimism (or, at the very least, of wishful thinking), for in assigning to this newly created period of mo-fa a duration of 10,000 years these Chinese commentators expressed the hope that Śākyamuni’s teachings would last forever, albeit in a reduced and less accessible form.

In light of the scenario outlined above it is no longer surprising that explicit references to a three-period system first appear not in sūtra and śāstra literature translated from Indian originals, but in 6th-century Chinese scholastic texts. For if the developed notion of three periods in the history of the Dharma indeed arose in the context of reflection on the meaning of the term mo-fa —itself a Chinese “apocryphal word” —we should expect this notion to have emerged well after the first appearances of this expression in Chinese Buddhist literature, which took place around the beginning of the 5th century CE. And this is precisely what we find, for it is Nan-yüeh Hui-ssu (515-577), best known as the teacher of T’ien-t’ai Chih-i, who is credited with having been the first to set forth in writing a three-period system based on eras of cheng-fa, hsiang-fa, and mo-fa, respectively, in a work completed in 558 CE.

But the absence of any direct evidence for the existence of a three-period system in the literature of Indian Buddhism has not stifled attempts by modern scholars (in particular, by modern Japanese scholars, in whose own religious traditions this system continues to hold a central place) to find evidence for its origins in India.