Editor’s note: This is the fourth of an 11-part series on Buddhism.
When its founder dies, a religion tends to splinter, partly because would-be successors become rivals for leadership and power and partly because the founder’s personality, which had helped bind the followers together, is absent.
Buddhism did not escape such a fate. Just as Christianity is divided into three main branches (Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Eastern Orthodoxy), along with their various subgroups, so there developed multiple Buddhisms: Hinayana in South Asia, Mahayana in East Asia, and Vajrayana in Tibet, each also having multiple subgroups. At one time, Hinayana had 18 subgroups, yet only Theravada survived.
“Yana” means “raft,” a metaphor for the various sects and their distinctive programs for getting across the metaphorical river separating the bank of samsara (the unsatisfactory cycle of life-death-rebirth) and the bank of nirvana. “Mahayana” or “big raft,” transports many passengers. “Hinayana” means “little raft,” indicating that it ferries only a few passengers.
Despite having rejected Hinduism’s class and caste system, elitist Theravada sharply distinguished monks (and later, nuns) from laypeople, creating, in effect, two classes of Buddhists, the former spiritually superior to the latter. Theravada also privileged men over women and monks over nuns.
While eventually conceding that a layman could become enlightened, Theravada insisted he would need to become a monk within seven days or the enlightenment could not be sustained. Theravada is individualistic, while Mahayana is more communal.
Hence Theravada’s ideal person is the arhat, one who seeks nirvana for himself alone and achieves it by his own efforts alone. Mahayana, by contrast, believes in giving and receiving help from others, hence its ideal type is the Bodhisattva, one who voluntarily chooses to be reborn countless times in order to save others. Theravada holds that practicing should be full time. Because laypersons have jobs and families, that ideal is impossible for them. Instead, Theravada encourages the laity to work hard, live within their means, take care of their possessions, surround themselves with good people, and earn merit that will result in a higher rebirth.
One of the principal ways laypeople earn merit is by giving generously to each other and to beggars of both their own and other religions. The greatest merit, however, comes from giving to the Buddhist monastic order. Laypersons often mix these Buddhist practices with those of indigenous religions.
The principal virtue of Theravada is Bodhi (wisdom of a more intellectual sort), while Mahayana relies on Prajna, the saving, intuitive insight into life’s oneness that can break through at any time or place and does not necessarily depend on years of meditation or monastic discipline.
It can come to the laity also. Prajna softens the heart and arouses compassion, Mahayana’s primary virtue. It is compassion that motivates the Bodhisattva’s efforts to help others. Persons aspiring to become Bodhisattvas seek to develop the six perfections (giving, morality, patience, vigor, meditation and wisdom).
Compassion includes even vicarious suffering as the following Bodhisattva vow reveals: “The whole world of living beings I must rescue from the terrors of birth, of old age, of sickness, of death and rebirth, of all kinds of moral offense, of all states of woe, of the whole cycle of birth-and-death, of the jungle of false views ... And why? Because surely it is better that I alone should be in pain than that all these beings should fall into the states of woe.”
Such compassion extends to non-human beings. A stunning example is the Bodhisattva who comes upon a mother tiger and her cubs. Having had nothing to eat for a long time, the mother tiger is not able to produce milk to feed her babies.
The Bodhisattva takes a piece of sharpened bamboo, slits his own throat, and lies down in front of the tiger’s mouth, saving her and the cubs.
The two groups differ also in their understanding of the Buddha. For Theravada, he is merely a human saint. Just as popular piety made Jesus and Muhammad more than human and attributed miracles to them, so Mahayana saw the Buddha as a savior, endowed him with a heavenly body (sambhogakaya) following his death, and, ultimately, identifies him with the essence of the universe (dharmakaya).
Eventually, Mahayana concludes that all beings possess the Buddha nature (the capacity to become a Buddha). Thus, the universe, filled with multiple Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, is regarded as helpful to one’s spiritual quest.
For Theravada, the universe is indifferent. Not surprisingly, Theravada makes no room for petitionary prayer whereas Mahayana does. Theravada tends toward literalism in interpreting scripture, while Mahayanists tend not to be literalists.
So diverse are Buddhist traditions that not until the late 19th century when British scholars noticed similarities among them did the peoples of Asian countries learn that they shared a common religion.
Milton Scarborough is emeritus professor of philosophy and religion at Centre College.
