As Xuanzang’s arduous journey to India and the controversy motivating it make clear, however, not all Buddhists were satisfied by this explanation. After all, the Buddha was the greatest of all teachers and this was clearly a factor in his disciples’ abilities to realize liberation under his guidance. Indeed, the body of literature detailing the Buddha’s prior lives (the Jataka Tales) portrays the Buddha’s closest disciples as having traveled with him over time as members of an ensemble of “characters” in a drama of liberation playing out over dozens of lifetimes. What of less karmically fortunate people living a hundred or a thousand years after the Buddha had died? If all beings have “no-self” or abiding essence, if all things are characterized by emptiness (śūnyatā) or the absence of any intrinsic nature—basic teachings of both early and later Buddhist traditions—and if we have been living the ignorance-biased lives of “sinners” rather than “saints”, how is liberation ever possible? Without the live guidance of a teacher like the Buddha, the possibility of enlightenment would seem to be purely theoretical.