Mahāyāna

← Encyclopedia

Mahāyāna is Sanskrit for “Great Vehicle” — the name one broad current of Buddhism gave to its own self-understanding, and to the aspiration at its center: that the goal of the path is not a person’s own release from suffering but the awakening of all beings, however long that takes.

The movement emerged within Indian Buddhism around the beginning of the Common Era, and not in the way the word “movement” suggests. Scholarship has found no schism, no founding council, no separate sect at the start; what appears instead is a slowly spreading body of new scriptures — sutras presenting themselves as the Buddha’s word — and a new ideal circulating among monks and laypeople inside existing communities. The texts came first. The institutions followed by centuries.

The ideal is the bodhisattva: a being who, capable of entering final peace, turns back instead, vowing to remain in the round of birth and death until every other being is brought across. Earlier Buddhist teaching had honored the arhat, the practitioner who wins liberation; the Mahāyāna texts measure themselves against that figure and call their own way greater — the polemical label Hīnayāna, “lesser vehicle,” is their coinage, and modern writers mostly avoid it for that reason. Alongside the new ideal came new metaphysics. The Perfection of Wisdom literature teaches that all things are empty of fixed essence; later schools debated whether that emptiness, or mind itself, is the final word. The Buddha, in this literature, is no longer only a remembered teacher: buddhas are many, their lifespans cosmic, their aid available — a universe considerably stranger and more populated than the one the earliest texts describe.

Carried along trade routes, the Great Vehicle became the Buddhism of China, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and — in its tantric development — Tibet, diversifying into forms as unlike one another as Pure Land devotion and Zen. What holds the family together is less a doctrine than the vow, and a tone: the insistence that wisdom and compassion are not two attainments but one.

Whether the Mahāyāna is a development of the Buddha’s teaching or a departure from it is a question as old as the texts themselves, argued inside the tradition and out, and it remains open. The library’s holdings include one of the first English collections of its scriptures — among them the legend of the Buddha’s life in verse and the sutras of the western paradise. A reader can watch the vehicle widen page by page. The texts themselves never apologize for it; in their own account, the teaching was always this large, and the world simply took time to hear it.

→ In the library: Buddhist Mahâyâna Texts (SBE 49 — Müller et al., 1894)

→ Related: Buddha