It appears that, throughout the course of Buddhist history, proponents of various schools were liable to forget this advice, and to become attached instead to their own interpretation of the Buddha‘s teachings, attempting to establish it as the correct view.
This resulted in the continual rise of new schools and interpretations intended to redress such mistakes, and to purge Buddhism of "certain metaphysical ideas that continued to creep into the teachings" (Kalupahana 1996, 1).
We have already seen that one common mistake was to reify certain concepts that were originally intended only as didactic devices. The Yogācāra have often been misinterpreted as suggesting a reified view of the 'Mind‘ or the 'Buddha.‘ Nāgārjuna‘s writings, on the other hand, as well as the negative declarations of the Heart Sūtra, are particularly prone to a nihilistic misinterpretation.
That is, while Nāgārjuna was concerned mainly with negating those concepts that other
schools had mistakenly reified, Asaṅga and Vasubandhu returned to affirmation, reinterpreting, as they reaffirmed, the concept of nirvana.