Skip to content
Unitive Knowledge Society
Search

Accents are optional; quotes find an exact phrase.
Menu

Tradition

Mahāyāna

The “Great Vehicle” of Buddhism, centred on the bodhisattva path and emptiness.

Also called Mahayana, Great Vehicle

A tradition of Buddhism

Introduction

Mahāyāna, the “Great Vehicle”, is the name of a movement that arose in Indian Buddhism around the beginning of the common era and became the Buddhism of East Asia and, in its Vajrayāna form, of Tibet. Its followers contrasted it with what they called the Hīnayāna, the “lesser vehicle”, a polemical term that modern scholars avoid.

The Mahāyāna holds up the ideal of the bodhisattva, who seeks full buddhahood for the sake of all beings, joining wisdom (prajñā) with compassion (karuṇā). Its philosophy is centred on emptiness, the absence of intrinsic existence in all things, taught in the Perfection of Wisdom sūtras and developed by the Madhyamaka and Yogācāra schools. Many Mahāyāna sūtras also teach that all beings have buddha-nature.

The Mahāyāna has a vast and varied scriptural literature, including the Lotus Sūtra, the Avataṃsaka, the Vimalakīrti, the Laṅkāvatāra and the Pure Land sūtras. Its teaching that buddhas and bodhisattvas are present and active for beings made devotion as central to it as meditation and philosophy.

History

Historical

The earliest Mahāyāna sūtras, among them the Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines, appear around the first century BCE or CE. For several centuries Mahāyāna monks seem to have lived within the same monasteries as followers of the older schools. Nāgārjuna in the second or third century founded the Madhyamaka, and Asaṅga and Vasubandhu in the fourth and fifth the Yogācāra; the great monastic universities, such as Nālandā, became centres of Mahāyāna learning.

Translators such as Kumārajīva (fourth and fifth centuries) and Xuanzang (seventh century) brought Mahāyāna texts into Chinese, where new schools developed: Tiantai, Huayan, Pure Land and Chan, which spread to Korea, Japan and Vietnam. In Tibet, Indian Mahāyāna together with tantra became the foundation of all schools.

Today Mahāyāna is the Buddhism of China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan and Vietnam, and of Tibetan, Mongolian and Himalayan communities, and the largest branch of Buddhism by number of followers.

  1. c. 1st c. BCE–1st c. CEThe earliest Perfection of Wisdom sūtras
  2. c. 2nd–3rd c.Nāgārjuna founds the Madhyamaka
  3. 4th–5th c.Asaṅga and Vasubandhu; Kumārajīva’s translations into Chinese
  4. 7th c.Xuanzang’s journey to India and his translations
  5. 8th c.Śāntideva at Nālandā

Major thinkers

Key concepts

Important texts

Convergence and divergence

Resemblance and difference, given equal room. Each note is marked with the kind of statement it makes.

Areas of convergence

  • Wisdom, with Christian Mysticism

    Scholarship

    Mahāyāna couples wisdom with compassion, as many contemplative traditions couple knowledge with love, and holds that neither is complete without the other.

  • Bhakti, with Viśiṣṭādvaita

    Scholarship

    Pure Land devotion, which relies on the vow of the Buddha Amitābha, has often been compared with Vaiṣṇava teachings of surrender to the Lord’s grace.

Areas of divergence

Cite this entry
Chicago (bibliography)

“Mahāyāna.” Tradition. The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society. Last modified November 7, 2026. https://www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/traditions/mahayana.

Chicago (note)

“Mahāyāna,” tradition, The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society, last modified November 7, 2026, https://www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/traditions/mahayana.

MLA

“Mahāyāna.” The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society, 7 Nov. 2026, www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/traditions/mahayana.

BibTeX
@misc{traditions-mahayana,
  title = {{Mahāyāna}},
  howpublished = {The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society},
  note = {Tradition. Last modified November 7, 2026},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/traditions/mahayana}
}

Schools and branches

Also in this tradition

Continue the inquiry

Traditions