Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Hinayana, also known as Theravada, encouraged scholasticism and close attention to
what were considered the original teachings of Sakyamuni. Mahayana, on the other hand,
with its elevation of compassion
(nyingje)
as an all-important idea, took Buddhism in a
new direction. It was the Mahayana school that made its way up to the high plateau and
took root there, at the same time travelling to China, Korea and Japan. Hinayana retreated
into southern India and took root in Sri Lanka and Thailand.
Buddhism is perhaps the most tolerant of the world's religions. Wherever it has gone it
has adapted to local conditions, like a dividing cell, creating countless new schools of
thought. Its basic tenets have remained very much the same and all schools are bound to-
gether in their faith in the original teachings of Sakyamuni (Sakya Thukpa), the Historical
Buddha. The Chinese invasion has ironically caused a flowering of Tibetan Buddhism
abroad and you can now find Tibetan monasteries around the world.
Mahayana
The claims that Mahayanists made for their faith were many, but the central issue was a
change in orientation from individual pursuit of enlightenment to bodhisattvahood. Rather
than striving for complete nonattachment, the bodhisattva aims, through compassion and
self-sacrifice, to achieve enlightenment for the sake of all beings.
In the meantime, Sakyamuni slowly began to change shape. Mahayanists maintained
that Sakyamuni had already attained buddhahood many aeons ago and that there were now
many such transcendent beings living in heavens or 'pure lands'. The revolutionary
concept had the effect of producing a pantheon of bodhisattvas, a feature that made Ma-
hayana more palatable to cultures that already had gods of their own. In Tibet, China,
Korea and Japan, the Mahayana pantheon came to be identified with local gods as their
Mahayana equivalents replaced them.
Tantrism (Vajrayana)
A further Mahayana development that is particularly relevant to Tibet is Tantrism. The
words of Sakyamuni were recorded in sutras and studied by students of both Hinayana and
Mahayana, but according to the followers of Tantrism, a school that emerged from around
AD 600, Sakyamuni left a corpus of esoteric instructions to a select few of his disciples.
These were known as Tantra (
Gyü
).
