Orality, writing and authority in South Asian Buddhism: Visionary Literature and the Struggle for Legitimacy in the Mahāyāna
By David L. McMahan
26 pagesLiteracy disrupted the continuity of the oral tradition and reoriented access to knowledge from the oral- and aural-sense world to the visual world.
How the emerging Mahāyāna movement in India capitalized on new technology (writing) to legitimate and spread their teachings, and how the new medium shaped them in turn.