It has long been felt that in the formation of boundaries between the religious traditions of South Asia, the composers of the Mahābhārata would have played a considerable role in generating the dynamics of what was to become Hinduism. But since the Mahābhārata is quiet if not exactly silent on the non-Brahmanical traditions, and particularly about Buddhism, scholars have not found it easy to discern how it might have constructed such borders and, still more durably, how it might have generated a new textual praxis that could be used by later epic and purāṇic authors to patrol them —if indeed such borders existed. One strain of scholarship approached this question from the standpoint that the Mahābhārata would have grown from oral origins into a massive ‘encyclopedia’, one that could eventually claim, ‘whatever is here may be found elsewhere; what is not here does not exist anywhere’ (Mahābhārata, 1.56.33; 18.5.38). From this vantage point, a text of such self-sufficiency and self-importance could, at the most, have absorbed some minor references to the heterodoxies only haphazardly as a reflex of its snowball descent through the centuries (Hopkins 1969: 363-402; 475). This view concurs with an assimilationist model of Hinduism's relation to other traditions. Another approach has been to suspect that the Mahābhārata has more to say about Buddhism than it makes immediately obvious, and that what it has to say would have to have been said at some significant time in history.