Sorry about my belated entry into this dialogue; i've just come off
teaching a nine day metta retreat at Wat Buddha Dhamma, north of
Sydney. While i was there, incidentally, i discovered an unpublished
manuscript of a translation of the Chinese (Dharmaguptaka)
patimokkha. It's a good translation, which i hope to make available
on the web. The text is almost identical to the Pali.
I agree with what has been said about hinayana - it was clearly
meant as a pejorative term. It should be regarded as not 'PC'.
The attempts to explain hinayana away as 'small vehicle' are, i
think, coming from an entirely justified sense of embarassment that
our Buddhist forbears actually descended to this kind of polemics. I
have read somewhere that the rendering in English of hinayana as
small vehicle was influenced by the Chinese translations. If i can
remember correctly, i think the earlier translators rendered
hinayana correctly as 'inferior vehicle'. But one very influential
translator (kumarajiva?) had sympathies towards the non-Mahayana
schools (apparantly he had converted from the sarvastivada and still
had respect for his earlier teachers), so he coined the rendering
small vehicle, which caught on in China, more due to his prestige
than the accuracy of the term. Later this influenced the English
translations.
But we must keep the context in mind: hinayana was intended as a
term of criticism of those early schools who were known to the
founders of the Mahayana, ie, primarily the sarvastivada. Only
occasionally do the mahayana writers acknowledge what we call
Theravada (known to the Northern schools as the Mahaviharavasins,
Tamrasatiyas, or Tambapanniyas). The only reference to the Sinhalese
Theravadins that i can think of off hand is in fact a positive one:
Vasubandhu, in trying to claim authenticity of the alayavijnana of
the Yogacarins, equates it with the mulavinnana of the Mahasanghikas
and the bhavangacitta of the Theravadins.
Anyway, hinayana was a blanket term for all the '18' schools;
Theravada should not be used in this sense. In fact, Theravada is
more properly used of the original school that separated from the
Mahasanghika at the first schism. What we today call Theravada is
really just the Sinhalese branch of this original school; many of
the other branches (Dharmaguptaka, Kasyapiya, Mahisasaka, etc.) on
the mainland had teachings that were, in the main, indistinguishable
from the Sinhalese Mahaviharavasins. As far as i know there is no
consistent conventions in how to use these names clearly. It would
be the clearest to refer to the Theravadins as the Mahaviharavasins
(dwellers in the Great Monastery, the Theravada headquarters in
Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka), but modern usage is against this. I use
the clumsy term 'ancestral Theravada' to distinguish the original
school.
The better term to use for the 18 early schools as a group is
savakayana (Skt sravakayana), disciples vehicle. As was mentioned
earlier, this was in vogue in ancient times, used by the Mahayanists
when they wished to be polite, and is used today by sensitive
Buddhists, such as the Dalai Lama.
It seems implausible that the negative image of the hinayana as
portrayed in the mahayana sutras has no historical basis. Something
was rotten somewhere. The problem is that, since the mahayanists
usually feel the need to insist that these texts derive literally
from the mouth of the Buddha, the problem is read back into the
Buddha's day, and the Buddha's own teachings are put down as
hinayana. In fact, it seems clear from a historical reading of these
texts (such as the samdhinirmocana Sutra, referred to earlier in
this thread), that these criticisms were directed against
degenerations and decadences that had overcome the early schools (or
some of them) in the Middle period of Indian Buddhism (circa 0 CE-
500 CE). When read in this way, we can rehabilitate these
scriptures: we do not need to see them as a threat to the purity of
the original teachings, but can read them as a warning and advice
from experience as to some of the problems that Buddhism can get
itself into, and perhaps, some of the ways it can get out of them...