What Is a Bodhisattva? Meaning, Path and Traditions

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 5 November 2026

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A bodhisattva (Pali bodhisatta) is someone on the way to becoming a buddha. In the Pali discourses the word names the Buddha himself before his awakening, and the Jātaka tales stretch it back across his past lives. Mahāyāna Buddhism opened it to everyone: whoever arouses bodhicitta, the resolve to become a buddha for the sake of all beings, is a bodhisattva, from a beginner who has just taken the vow to great figures such as Avalokiteśvara.

What does bodhisattva mean?

The first half is the easy one: bodhi, in the Pali Text Society’s dictionary, is “(supreme) knowledge, enlightenment, the knowledge possessed by a Buddha”. The debate is over the second half (the glossary entry has the short version).

The familiar reading takes sattva as “being”. The Pali Text Society’s Pali-English Dictionary calls a bodhisatta a “bodhi-being,” that is, “a being destined to attain fullest enlightenment or Buddhaship”, and Franklin Edgerton’s Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Dictionary gives “person destined for enlightenment, Buddha-to-be”.

Bhikkhu Anālayo’s The Genesis of the Bodhisattva Ideal (2010) gathers the case for reading Pali satta as Sanskrit sakta, attached to or intent on: Karl Eugen Neumann put it forward as a possible derivation; the Pali commentaries already offer it as one explanation among several, Yuichi Kajiyama notes, a bodhisatta being “attached, wholly attached to awakening”; and Tilmann Vetter suggested the Sanskrit bodhisattva may have won out because “sakta was perhaps felt to be used too much in a negative sense.” Paul Oltramare objected that the root never seems to have expressed a spiritual or moral attachment.

Translators take sides too. Bhikkhu Bodhi writes that bodhisatta “could also represent Sanskrit bodhisakta, meaning ‘one intent on enlightenment,’” which he finds makes better sense than “an enlightenment being.” Bhikkhu Sujato renders the word “intent on awakening” in his SuttaCentral translations, and explains in a note to MN 4 that Pali satta represents several Sanskrit words, including sajjita, “intent on, devoted to, fixed upon”, “which makes better sense here than sattva (‘being’).” Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu keeps the Pali word: “when I was an unawakened bodhisatta”.

The bodhisatta in the early texts

In the Pali discourses, Anālayo shows, the word is used mainly by the Buddha himself, in a stock phrase about the time “before awakening”, and Sujato’s note to MN 4 calls such passages “apparently the original context for this term.” Here is the phrase in the Noble Quest:

The phrase recurs in MN 4, 19, 36 and 128, SN 12.65 and AN 3.103. Anālayo finds that most of these passages describe the Buddha-to-be’s meditation, his struggle with unwholesome thoughts and his growth in tranquillity and insight, and sums up the early sense of the word as “in search of awakening”. In these texts, Bhikkhu Bodhi observes, the Buddha “says nothing to suggest that he had been consciously following a deliberate course of conduct aimed at the attainment of Buddhahood.”

Later books of the Pali Canon fill that gap. The Jātaka collection gathers, in Access to Insight’s description, “547 tales that recount some of the Buddha’s former lives during his long journey as a Bodhisatta aspiring to Awakening” (see Jātaka tales). The Buddhavaṃsa, a relatively late addition that may still date from the third to the second century BCE (Jeffrey Samuels, citing Gombrich and Warder), tells of the vow that began it. Sumedha lies in the mud for the Buddha Dīpaṅkara to walk on, and sees that he could burn up his defilements that very day. He declines. In I. B. Horner’s translation, quoted by Samuels: “What is the use of my crossing over alone, being a man aware of my strength?” (Bv 2:56). He resolves instead to reach omniscience and carry the world across, and Dīpaṅkara predicts his buddhahood. The qualities he then perfects over many lives are the ten perfections.

The story is absent from the Pali discourses. Jan Nattier, quoted by Anālayo, concludes that “Dīpaṃkara’s complete absence from the Pāli sutta literature makes it virtually certain” that traditions about him “did not gain currency until several centuries after Śākyamuni Buddha’s death” (see types of buddhas). Anālayo traces how the word came to mean a being “inevitably destined to reach awakening”, who vows and receives a prediction from a former buddha; with those strands, he concludes, “the basic ingredients of the bodhisattva ideal seem to fall into place.”

The Mahāyāna bodhisattva: a path for anyone

What the Mahāyāna changed was less the idea than who it was for. Peter Skilling, quoted by Anālayo, writes that the available scriptures of the eighteen schools allow all three goals, arahant, solitary buddha or buddha, as “one’s own decision”, and that at an uncertain point, perhaps the first century BCE, groups of monks, nuns and lay followers “began to devote themselves exclusively to the Bodhisattvayāna.” For those who held that everyone should do the same, it “became the Great Vehicle, the Mahāyāna.” In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s words, “all serious Mahāyānists take the bodhisattva vow, promising to become Buddhas in order to help all beings.”

The Lotus Sutra presses the point. In 84000’s summary of its second chapter, the Buddha “states that there is only one yāna, which is the way to buddhahood, and the division into three yānas is merely a skillful method used by the buddhas.” Its monk Sadāparibhūta greets everyone he meets with the words “you will all become tathāgatas, arhats, perfectly enlightened buddhas.”

The path’s training is the six perfections: in the Stanford Encyclopedia’s list, generosity, moral discipline, patient endurance, perseverance, meditative stability and wisdom. Its stages are the ten bhūmis, whose presentation in the Daśabhūmika Sūtra, 84000’s introduction says, “has become the standard presentation in Mahāyāna Buddhism of a bodhisattva’s progress toward buddhahood.” Running through both is upāya, skilful means (Thurman’s “liberative art”), which the Vimalakīrti Sūtra ties to the bodhisattva’s choice to stay in the world: “Out of skill in liberative art, he does not rest in the uncompounded”. Śāntideva’s Way of the Bodhisattva sets out the whole path in verse.

Do bodhisattvas postpone nirvana?

It is often said that a bodhisattva puts off nirvana until every being is saved. The texts give a more careful answer in two parts.

First, what a bodhisattva declines is the arahant’s way out, not buddhahood; Sumedha in the mud is the model. Mahāyāna sources keep that shape: 84000’s glossary to the Lotus Sutra says bodhisattvas “purposely opt to remain within cyclic existence in order to liberate all sentient beings, instead of simply seeking personal freedom from suffering.” The Vimalakīrti Sūtra describes the balance a bodhisattva holds:

Earlier in the same passage the bodhisattva “considers misery, but he reincarnates voluntarily.”

Second, the goal is not a nirvana that would end the work. The Mahāyāna teachings, 84000’s glossary to the Vimalakīrti explains, do not count the arhats’ nirvana as ultimate: buddhas attain “nonabiding nirvāṇa” (apratiṣṭhitanirvāṇa), which “transcends the extremes of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa, i.e., existence and peace.” In the Mahāyāna tenet systems, adds the glossary of Study Buddhism (Alexander Berzin’s archive), that state lasts forever. Charles Goodman and Aaron Schultz, in the Stanford Encyclopedia, write that mature Mahāyāna traditions “tend to hold that those who have become Buddhas, even after they die, continue to manifest in various forms”, and “will remain in cyclic existence until all sentient beings have reached liberation.”

Reporting a 2020 teaching, the Dalai Lama’s office wrote that he noted that “although people say, ‘I’ll attain enlightenment after everyone else’, it doesn’t usually work out that way”, and that he set out three ways in which bodhisattvas conduct themselves: “Like a King, leading from the front; like a ferryman who goes along with everyone else and like a shepherd who comes after his flock.” Theravāda answers differently again: it holds, in the Stanford Encyclopedia’s words, that “like Saints, Buddhas pass into Nirvana at death.”

Great bodhisattvas and living ones

The great bodhisattvas. Mahāyāna sūtras are full of bodhisattvas, the greatest of them given the epithet mahāsattva, which 84000’s glossary explains: “Literally ‘great being.’ An epithet for a bodhisattva of great accomplishment.” Edgerton’s dictionary records a list of eight special bodhisattvas, among them Maitreya, Samantabhadra, Vajrapāṇi, Mañjuśrī and Kṣitigarbha. These figures have pages here (the quoted descriptions are from 84000’s glossaries):

• Avalokiteśvara: “A bodhisattva emblematic of the great compassion”, venerated in China in female form as Guanyin.
• Mañjuśrī: “a bodhisattva who embodies wisdom”.
• Maitreya: “prophesied to be the next buddha”.
• Samantabhadra: “A principal bodhisattva in the Mahāyāna sūtras”.
• Kṣitigarbha: on Edgerton’s list of eight.
• Vajrapāṇi: he “first appears in Buddhist literature as the yakṣa bodyguard of the Buddha” and became a bodhisattva with the rise of the Mahāyāna.

Tārā is a special case. According to Vajrayāna Buddhism, Jeff Watt writes, she is “a completely enlightened Buddha”; one of the main reasons she is often called a bodhisattva in the West, he explains, is her “bodhisattva appearance”, the look of a peaceful deity. The figure pages describe the devotion their communities practise.

Living bodhisattvas. In Mahāyāna terms anyone who has taken the vow is a bodhisattva, however new. Tibetan Buddhism adds that some teachers are the rebirths of advanced bodhisattvas. The Dalai Lama’s 2011 statement on reincarnation explains that “superior Bodhisattvas, who have attained the path of seeing” are reborn not through karma but “due to the power of their compassion for sentient beings and based on their prayers to benefit others”, choosing their place and time of birth. Recognised reincarnations, or tulkus, he writes, may be emanations of buddhas, superior bodhisattvas or bodhisattvas on the earlier paths of accumulation and preparation, “as well as masters who are evidently yet to enter these Bodhisattva paths.” His office says the Dalai Lamas are “considered to be manifestations of Avalokiteshvara, or Chenrezig, the Bodhisattva of Compassion”, and he too is believed to be one. Asked if he believes it, he has said “The answer is not simple to give”, yet he has “no difficulty accepting” a spiritual connection to the previous Dalai Lamas, to Chenrezig and to the Buddha (see the Dalai Lama).

How the traditions differ

Theravāda

The bodhisatta path is real but uncommon. Most Theravāda practitioners aim to become arahants, the Stanford Encyclopedia notes, while “A small minority of Theravādins, however, aspire to become Buddhas,” a path believed “more difficult” and longer. Samuels shows the aspiration being lived: kings in Sri Lanka, Burma and Thailand openly declared themselves bodhisattvas (it may be argued, he allows, that they drew on Mahāyāna doctrines), and around 1900 the Sri Lankan monk Doratiyāveye refused a meditation practice that might have made him an arahant, because he had vowed to become a buddha. Samuels quotes Walpola Rahula’s summary: though Theravādins “believe that anyone can become a bodhisattva, they do not stipulate or insist that everyone must become a bodhisattva”.

East Asian Mahāyāna

In China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, the Stanford Encyclopedia notes, the Mahāyāna is the principal form of Buddhism, so the bodhisattva path is the mainstream ideal. The Brahma Net Sutra says that “Whoever can understand and accept a Dharma Master’s words of transmission can receive the Bodhisattva precepts”, a list that runs from kings and monks to “a prostitute, a slave” and “an animal” (see bodhisattva vows). The Lotus Sutra’s chapter on Avalokiteśvara, Guanyin in China, teaches in 84000’s summary that “hearing the name of Avalokiteśvara, and thinking of him, or calling out to him” will save beings from dangers, a promise devotees hold in faith.

Tibetan Buddhism

In the 2020 teaching, his office reports, the Dalai Lama called “the method for exchanging self with others” one of the key ways to cultivate bodhicitta; this site’s pages on tonglen and lojong describe the practice. Tibetan Buddhism also has a formal system for recognising the reincarnate teachers described above; the Dalai Lama’s 2011 statement dates it to the early thirteenth century and the recognition of Karmapa Pagshi.

Modern engaged Buddhism

Plum Village describes Thich Nhat Hanh’s Order of Interbeing, established in Saigon in 1966, as committed to the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings, “a distillation of the Bodhisattva (Enlightened Being) teachings of Mahayana Buddhism”; its first six members worked with him “relieving the suffering of war” (see engaged Buddhism). Bhikkhu Bodhi, writing generally, adds a caution: it would be “an oversimplification to equate the pursuit of the bodhisattva ideal with engagement in social service”, since the perfections of meditation and wisdom ask for a contemplative life too.

How does someone become a bodhisattva?

In Mahāyāna terms, by a change of motive rather than of status. Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra says it happens at once:

The same chapter separates “The mind aspiring to awaken” from “bodhicitta that’s enacted”, as different as “wishing to go and setting out upon a journey” (1.15–16). Real bodhicitta, Bodhi cautions, “usually arises only through diligent training in meditation.” The wish is then made formal in the bodhisattva vows. Anyone thinking of taking the vow is best advised to ask a teacher in their own tradition.

Bodhisattva, buddha and arahant

A buddha, in the Stanford Encyclopedia’s description of the Theravāda view, “rediscovers the truths of Buddhism after they have been lost to the world, and teaches them to others”; an arahant lives a last life and “will no longer be reborn”; a bodhisattva is one still on the way to buddhahood. The three are compared side by side on arahant vs buddha vs bodhisattva. For the wider family of figures, return to Buddhas and bodhisattvas.