The Great Vehicle
Mahāyāna means "Great Vehicle". Its followers gave that name to a set of ideals that grew up within Buddhism from around the 1st century BCE. At the centre is the bodhisattva: someone who vows to become a fully awakened Buddha, however many lifetimes it takes, in order to free all beings, rather than seeking only their own liberation as an arahant.
Mahāyāna texts sometimes called the older path the Hīnayāna, the "lesser vehicle". That was a polemical label, and scholars now avoid it.
What changed
The bodhisattva path is described as the practice of six perfections: generosity, ethical conduct, patience, energy, meditation and wisdom. It begins with bodhicitta, the aspiration to awaken for the benefit of all.
The Mahāyāna sūtras also opened up the universe. They speak of countless Buddhas in countless world systems, some of them teaching now, and of great bodhisattvas such as Avalokiteśvara, the embodiment of compassion, and Mañjuśrī, of wisdom, to whom people could pray. The Pure Land of the Buddha Amitābha became one of the most loved of these visions.
Not a breakaway church
Mahāyāna did not begin as a separate order. Its monks were ordained under the same monastic codes as everyone else and often lived in the same monasteries. Chinese pilgrims to India in the 5th to 7th centuries, such as Faxian and Yijing, describe Mahāyāna and non-Mahāyāna monks living side by side, differing mainly in which sūtras they read and whether they honoured the bodhisattvas.
Why it matters
Mahāyāna eventually becomes dominant across much of East Asian Buddhism.
History and tradition
What historians can say
How Mahāyāna began is still debated. Older theories credited lay devotees gathered around stupas; more recent work by scholars such as Jan Nattier and Gregory Schopen points instead to groups of monks, some of them strict forest-dwellers, and to communities devoted to particular new texts. In India, inscriptions mentioning Mahāyāna are surprisingly rare until several centuries later, which suggests it long remained a minority within Indian Buddhism, even as it became dominant in East Asia and Tibet.
What Buddhist tradition remembers
Mahāyāna traditions hold that these teachings were given by the Buddha himself, some to audiences of bodhisattvas and gods, and kept hidden until people were ready for them. One legend says Nāgārjuna recovered the Perfection of Wisdom sūtras from the realm of the nāgas.