Mahayana Buddhism: Meaning, Beliefs and Schools

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 1 June 2026 · Updated 9 November 2026

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Mahayana Buddhism (Sanskrit mahāyāna, “Great Vehicle”) is the family of Buddhist traditions centred on the bodhisattva, one who seeks full buddhahood for the sake of all beings. It arose within Indian Buddhism around the beginning of the Common Era and by the 9th century had become the dominant influence on the Buddhist cultures of Central and East Asia. It includes Zen, Pure Land and Nichiren; Tibetan Buddhism is often counted within it too, though many overviews list its Vajrayana as a third branch.

See also the branches of Buddhism and Theravada vs Mahayana.

What is Mahayana Buddhism?

Mahayana is a family, not one school. Britannica characterises it by “a grandiose cosmology, often complex ritualism, paradoxical metaphysics, and universal ethics”. Most Theravada practitioners aspire to become arahants; by contrast, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) says, “all serious Mahāyānists take the bodhisattva vow, promising to become Buddhas in order to help all beings”.

Whether Vajrayana belongs inside it depends on who is counting. Pew Research Center lists three branches but notes that some scholars count two and treat Vajrayana as part of the Mahayana. The SEP, which also groups Buddhism into three traditions, says Vajrayana can be seen as a branch of the Mahayana, since it shares the same spiritual goal and pursues it by tantric means. Alexander Berzin of Study Buddhism places it inside, counting the Chinese and Tibetan traditions as the two surviving Mahayana divisions. The Dalai Lama, teaching in 2014, put it another way: in Tibetan Buddhism “all three vehicles are integrated and practised together”.

What the name means

Mahāyāna means “Great Vehicle”; Britannica also gives “Greater Vehicle”, the SEP “Great Way”. In the Pali Text Society’s dictionary, yāna is a “means of motion, carriage, vehicle”. The name was also a claim: Britannica’s entry argues that defining Mahayana as one of three vehicles was meant to establish its superiority over other teachings, and that the scheme has no historical basis.

Its foil was Hīnayāna, “Lesser Vehicle”, and scholars differ on whom it named. The SEP calls it “a pejorative term” that Mahayana texts applied to the lineages whose chief aim was arahantship. Jonathan Silk, in Britannica’s entry, goes further: the word was used “to criticize unacceptable and deviant opinions”, and it “has no real-world referent and is never equivalent to non-Mahayana Buddhism, much less to any specific sect such as the Theravada”.

Origins: a movement, not a founding

Mahayana’s beginnings are obscure. The date and place of its emergence are unknown, and it most likely took shape over time and in several places. Its earliest sources are the Mahayana sūtras, first compiled some four centuries after the Buddha’s death, almost certainly by monks, and presented as sermons of the Buddha Śākyamuni.

Accounts of those beginnings differ. Some scholars, the SEP reports, conclude that Mahayana began within early Buddhism, among practitioners who shared their fellow Buddhists’ doctrines and rituals and differed only in choosing the path to buddhahood; other differences evolved later. 84000’s introduction to its Lotus Sutra notes the argument that Mahayana sūtras first appeared in the Mahāsāṃghika tradition. Access to Insight, a Theravada site, says one of the early schools “eventually gave rise to a reform movement that called itself Mahayana”.

Silk’s entry stresses that it was no breakaway order. Its monks are ordained in the existing Vinaya lineages, and the movement is thoroughly monastic: Chinese monks, for example, are ordained under the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya and also take bodhisattva vows. Many non-Mahayana texts date from after the Mahayana was established, so both literatures show mutual influence, and Mahayana “should not be seen as the successor to an earlier established tradition”.

By way of Central Asia, Buddhism reached China, where Mahayana in time became dominant; the Chinese form then spread to Korea, Japan and Vietnam. The Tibetan Mahayana tradition began in the 7th century and spread across the Himalayas to Mongolia and several regions of Russia. See how Buddhism spread.

The bodhisattva ideal

The idea at the centre is the bodhisattva, “one who seeks to become a Buddha” in Britannica’s definition. The dominant view in non-Mahayana Buddhism keeps the title for the Buddha before his awakening; Mahayana teaches that anyone can aspire to awakening and so become a bodhisattva. Bodhisattvas seek to understand reality through wisdom (prajñā) and to actualise it through compassion (karuṇā); since no one has a self, their own liberation is not distinct from the liberation of all beings.

Set against the Theravada arahant, the perfected saint, this is a different goal, full buddhahood rather than arahantship, not a contrast of selfless and selfish. A small minority of Theravādins also aspire to become buddhas, the SEP notes, and the Mahayana texts’ picture of disciples seeking nirvana for themselves alone may be “directed at a straw man and not at the real Theravāda tradition” (see arahant, buddha and bodhisattva). The popular picture of a bodhisattva “postponing” nirvana is put more carefully in 84000’s definitions: bodhisattvas “purposely opt to remain within cyclic existence in order to liberate all sentient beings”, and buddhas attain a “nonabiding nirvāṇa” that “transcends the extremes of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa” (see do bodhisattvas postpone nirvana?).

The path is organised around the six perfections: generosity, moral discipline, patient endurance, perseverance, meditative stability and wisdom, in the SEP’s renderings. It runs through ten bodhisattva levels. Śāntideva puts the aspiration as a prayer (see may I be a bridge):

The ideal’s great figures include Avalokiteśvara, the bodhisattva who embodies compassion, known in China, in female form, as Guanyin: in 84000’s words, “the most important bodhisattva in all of East Asia”.

Core beliefs: emptiness and the two truths

For Mahayana, awakening consists in understanding the true nature of reality, and the emphasis falls less on nirvana and more on knowledge or wisdom. Non-Mahayana doctrine stresses that persons lack a self (not-self); Mahayana extends that to all things. This radical extension of dependent arising is called emptiness (śūnyatā): nothing has an essence, and each thing exists in dependence on others. The Heart Sutra puts it in a line: Avalokiteśvara “saw that the five aggregates are also empty of an intrinsic nature” (Toh 21, 84000).

Emptiness is not a claim that nothing exists. Later philosophers such as Jñānagarbha (8th century) set out two truths, absolute (paramārtha) and conventional (saṃvṛti): ultimately, things “do not exist as such, which is to say, do not exist as they seem to exist, substantially”.

The Indian schools: Madhyamaka, Yogācāra and buddha-nature

Traditional doxographies divide Indian Mahayana philosophy into two schools. Madhyamaka (“Intermediate”) takes its name from the claim that Buddhism is a middle path between eternalism and annihilationism (see the middle way). Its founder, Nāgārjuna (150–c. 250 CE in Britannica’s dating), systematised the Perfection of Wisdom scriptures, which make wisdom the most important of the six perfections.

Yogācāra is credited in Britannica’s Mahayana entry to Asaṅga and his brother Vasubandhu, and described as “a synthesis of the Madhyamika emptiness doctrine with Abhidharmic systematics”. Britannica’s two entries date it differently: the Yogachara entry has the school emerging about the 2nd century CE and most productive in the 4th, in the brothers’ time; the Mahayana entry has Asaṅga flourishing in the 5th. Its “storehouse consciousness” (ālaya-vijñāna) stores the seeds of all future experience and is replenished whenever a morally significant act is done. Britannica calls Yogācāra “an influential idealistic school”; Jonathan Gold, in the SEP’s entry on Vasubandhu, calls the question an “ongoing, contentious” debate and concludes that Vasubandhu is an idealist “but only in the realm of conventions”. Xuanzang took the school to China in the 7th century, where it became Faxiang, and it reached Japan as Hossō.

Modern scholars also recognise a Tathāgatagarbha or buddha-nature tradition, which emphasises the inherent seed of awakening in all beings. Its texts, among them the Nirvāṇa, Śrīmālādevī and Laṅkāvatāra sūtras, became some of the most influential in China, “and especially in the development of Chan” (Peter Hershock, SEP).

A new body of scripture

Mahayana revered a large new literature: the Perfection of Wisdom (Prajñāpāramitā) sūtras, including the Heart and the Diamond; the Lotus Sutra, an early Mahayana scripture; the Avataṃsaka and Mahāparinirvāṇa; the Vimalakīrti, which its translator Robert Thurman calls “a quintessence of Mahāyāna doctrines”; and the Pure Land sūtras. Their weight varies by region: in Tibet, 84000’s introduction notes, the Lotus Sutra “never gained the prominence it achieved in China, let alone in Japan”.

Skilful means (upāya) is crucial to the Mahayana vision of salvation: motivated by compassion and guided by wisdom, buddhas and bodhisattvas wish to lead ordinary beings to liberation. The Lotus Sutra, the SEP’s entry on Tiantai says, “had made upāya the centerpiece of Buddhism”, and its chapter on skilful means joins it to the doctrine of the one vehicle:

The sūtras’ authority has long been argued. The Dalai Lama, in his 2014 teaching, named Nāgārjuna as a defender of the Mahayana’s authenticity, with Maitreya, Bhāvaviveka and Śāntideva confirming it, and noted that some in Taiwan and China, and to an extent in countries that follow the Pali tradition, still challenge it.

Buddhas without number, three bodies and the Pure Land vow

Among the Pali discourses, DN 14 names seven buddhas, from Vipassī to Gotama, DN 26 one to come, Metteyya, or Maitreya, and MN 115 holds that two fully awakened buddhas cannot arise in the same world system at once. Mahayana joined universal access to awakening to a beginningless universe of infinite worlds, and so arrived at infinite buddhas, each dwelling in his own world-realm, and many objects of veneration: buddhas such as Amitābha and Vairocana, bodhisattvas such as Avalokiteśvara, and in time the Lotus Sutra’s title in Nichiren’s calligraphy. See types of buddhas and buddhas and bodhisattvas.

The three bodies. Britannica describes the trikāya as a buddha’s three modes of being: the dharmakāya (body of essence), unmanifested, the supreme state of absolute knowledge; the sambhogakāya (body of enjoyment), heavenly; and the nirmāṇakāya (body of transformation), earthly, the Buddha as he appeared on earth or as manifest in a bodhisattva, a king, a painting or even a lotus. It applies to all buddhas, not Gautama alone (see one buddha, three bodies).

Merit and the Pure Land vow. In Britannica’s account, the bodhisattva Dharmākara made vows that set the conditions under which he would become the Buddha Amitābha (Japanese Amida): to create the world-realm Sukhāvatī, “Pure Bliss”, and to guarantee that ordinary beings could be reborn there “merely by having faith in him” (see Pure Land Buddhism). Merit has always mattered in Buddhism, but applying it to wisdom and awakening rather than to better rebirths is a Mahayana innovation.

Where is Mahayana Buddhism practised today?

Mahayana is the Buddhism of East Asia. Pew Research Center names China, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam as countries with very large Buddhist populations where it prevails, and describes Vietnam’s Buddhists as practising “the same strain of Buddhism (Mahayana) found across East Asia”. In its Tibetan form it is practised in Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan and Mongolia. Pew’s figures below count adults who identify as Buddhist of any kind; most surveys do not ask which branch.

Mahayana once spread to Myanmar and Sri Lanka as well, but has not survived there. See Buddhism around the world.

How the traditions differ

Within Mahayana:

• Chan / Zen (Sŏn in Korea, Thiền in Vietnam; see Chan, Sŏn and Thiền): Chinese, from the 6th century; the SEP calls Mahayana the tradition “of which Zen is an offshoot”. Its name means “meditation”, but meditation did not set Chan apart within Chinese Buddhism, Peter Hershock writes in the SEP; its novel use of language, its new narrative forms and its stress on direct, embodied realisation did.
• Pure Land (Jōdo and Jōdo Shinshū in Japan): rebirth in Amitābha’s Sukhāvatī through faith in him.
• Tiantai / Tendai: the school’s real beginning came with Zhiyi (538–597) on Mount Tiantai, and it was based on the Lotus Sutra; Saichō, returning from China in 805, brought it to Japan.
• Nichiren: Nichiren (1222–82), who had studied in the Tendai tradition, set out in 1253 to proclaim the Lotus Sutra’s supremacy and taught homage to its title, Namu myōhō renge kyō.
• Huayan / Kegon (Hwaeom in Korea): the name means “Flower Garland”, after the Avataṃsaka Sūtra; among its doctrines is “one is all, and all is one”.
• Tibetan schools (the four orders): in the Dalai Lama’s account, the Vinaya is the basis for bodhisattva practice done together with tantra; Tibetan scholasticism took a particular interest in Madhyamaka and logic.

Monastic life differs too. In Japan a conception of renunciation led in practice, and by the Meiji period (1868–1912) in law, to married priests and the virtual extinction of traditional celibate monasticism; Tibet’s Nyingma order has married clergy alongside celibate monasticism (see can Buddhists get married?).

Against Theravada, in brief (the full comparison is on Theravada vs Mahayana):

Theravada, like all other Buddhist schools, claims to adhere most closely to the Buddha’s original teaching, and Silk finds the differences usually “more a matter of degree and emphasis than of basic opposition”. Both keep the four noble truths, whose fourth is the path (the Eightfold Path); all Buddhist traditions count that teaching as the Buddha’s first.