Buddhism's Great Vehicle may owe its name to a misheard word for knowledge
Mahayana means Great Vehicle, but one scholar thinks the earliest Lotus Sutra actually spoke of mahajana, great knowing. When the text moved into Sanskrit, the ambiguous sound may have become vehicle, helped by a parable about carts. Whatever its name's origin, it is now Buddhism's largest branch.
Mahayana took shape in ancient India from about the 1st century BCE as a loose family of traditions, texts and philosophies. It keeps the core early Buddhist scriptures but adds others that Theravada does not treat as canonical, such as the Lotus Sutra and the Vajra-cutter Sutra. At their centre stands the bodhisattva, a being who vows to become a buddha in order to save everyone, a compassionate resolve called bodhicitta.
That ideal gives the movement its alternative name, Bodhisattvayana. Anyone who takes the vow may walk the path to buddhahood, and the arhat's personal liberation is seen as a lesser, incomplete goal. Mahayana also honours figures unknown in Theravada, like Amitabha and Vairocana, and develops distinctive philosophies, including Madhyamaka's teaching of emptiness and Vijnanavada, a doctrine centred on consciousness. Jan Nattier argues the Great Vehicle label began simply as an honorific for the bodhisattva path, and the supposed opposite, Hinayana, is rare in the earliest texts.
The Lotus Sutra, composed sometime from the 1st century BCE into the following century, holds some of the oldest uses of the word. Seishi Karashima suggests an earlier Gandhari Prakrit version used mahajana, meaning great knowledge, which was later rendered as mahayana, perhaps because the Parable of the Burning House describes three carts.
Beginning as a minor current, it came to dominate Indian Buddhism, with great monastic universities like Nalanda and Vikramashila flourishing from the 7th to the 12th centuries. It spread across Central, East and Southeast Asia and the Himalayas. Zen, Pure Land and Tiantai prevail in China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, while tantric Vajrayana, which promises a swift route to awakening, dominates Tibet, Mongolia and Bhutan. Figures for 2010 put 53 percent of Buddhists in East Asian Mahayana and 6 percent in Vajrayana, against 36 percent in Theravada.
Source: Mahayana
