IB World Religions 2.4.6. Schools of Thought: Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana and Buddhism in the West Notes

2.4.6. Schools of Thought: Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana and Buddhism in the West

The early divisions

1. Buddhism's branches did not begin with one dramatic break. The sources describe a run of disagreements over discipline and interpretation, spread across several centuries after the Buddha's death.
2. The tradition reports a first council at Rajagaha to recite the teaching, and a second at Vesali about a century later, called over ten disputed monastic practices including whether monks could accept money.
3. The first lasting split followed that dispute. The Sthaviravada (Pali Theravada: the elders) separated from the Mahasanghika (the great assembly), and the quarrel concerned discipline and the standing of the arahant rather than the core teaching.
4. Further division produced what later sources count as eighteen early schools, each with its own canon and its own recension of the Vinaya. Only one of them, the Theravada, survives today.
5. Mahayana arose in a different way. It appears to have begun as a movement across existing monasteries rather than as a breakaway order, so Mahayana and other monks often shared the same discipline and the same buildings.
6. Buddhists therefore describe the branches as yanas (vehicles) rather than as denominations. The word frames them as routes to one destination, which is why the branches rarely treat one another as standing outside Buddhism.

Theravada

1. Theravada means the way of the elders, and its adherents present it as the branch that has preserved the earliest teaching with the least addition.
2. Its scriptural authority is the Pali Canon, and its language of study is Pali. Later works, above all Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga, guide how the canon is read.
3. The ideal it holds up is the arahant (Sanskrit arhat), a person who has completed the path in this life and will not be reborn again.
4. Monastic life is central to it. Theravada holds that the full path is most realistically walked under the Vinaya, and lay life is usually oriented toward merit and a better rebirth.
5. It is the majority tradition in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, with substantial communities in Bangladesh and southern Vietnam.
6. It carries real internal variety. Forest traditions in Thailand stress meditation and seclusion, while town monasteries often concentrate on scholarship, teaching and ceremonies for lay supporters.

The Mahayana movement

1. Mahayana means the great vehicle, and the name makes a claim about scope. Its texts present a path open to everyone rather than one completed mainly by monastics.
2. Its ideal is the bodhisattva, a being who postpones final Buddhahood in order to help others, so compassion stands alongside wisdom as the engine of the path.
3. Mahayana accepts sutras that Theravada does not, among them the Prajnaparamita literature, the Lotus Sutra and the Sukhavati sutras, and it holds them to be the Buddha's word.
4. Doctrinally it extends anatta into sunyata (emptiness), the claim that all phenomena, and not persons alone, lack independent existence. Nagarjuna is its most influential exponent.
5. Upaya (skill in means) is what holds the variety together. Teachings are described as shaped to fit their hearers, so different presentations can each be true without contradicting one another.
6. Mahayana spread along the trade routes into China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam, where it grew schools with their own scriptures, practices and forms of clergy.

Ch'an, Zen and Pure Land

1. East Asian Mahayana produced schools that differ sharply in method while agreeing on doctrine. Two approaches came to dominate, one built on meditation and one on devotion.
2. Ch'an grew in China from around the seventh century, and its name descends from dhyana (meditative absorption). It plays down scriptural study in favour of direct pointing and seated meditation.
3. Ch'an traces itself to Bodhidharma, remembered as bringing the teaching from India, and it divided over whether awakening arrives suddenly or by degrees.
4. Transplanted to Japan, Ch'an became Zen. Rinzai works with the koan, a problem built to defeat ordinary reasoning, while Soto, shaped by Dogen, practises shikantaza, sitting with no object at all.
5. Pure Land takes the opposite route. Honen and his student Shinran taught that the present age is too degenerate for self-power, and that reliance on Amida Buddha's vow is the realistic path.
6. Its practice is the nembutsu, recitation of Amida's name. Jodo Shinshu, Shinran's school, became the largest Buddhist body in Japan, and its priests marry and raise families.
7. Nichiren offers a third route, teaching that the Lotus Sutra alone suffices and that chanting its title carries the whole power of the text.

Vajrayana and tantra

1. Vajrayana means the diamond or thunderbolt vehicle. It understands itself as a path inside Mahayana that reaches the same goal by a faster and more demanding route.
2. Its distinctive scriptures are the tantras, and its methods use the body and the imagination directly rather than treating them as obstacles to be set aside.
3. Practice runs through mantra (sacred sound), mudra (ritual gesture) and mandala (a diagram of a Buddha's realm), together with deity yoga, in which a practitioner visualises himself as an awakened being.
4. The reasoning behind the method is that the qualities being cultivated are already present. Rehearsing awakening is held to be quicker than approaching it slowly from outside.
5. Because the methods are considered risky, they pass only by empowerment from a lama, which makes the teacher's role heavier here than in the other branches.
6. It predominates in Tibet, Bhutan, Mongolia and the Himalayan regions of Nepal and India, and it carries four schools: Nyingma, Kagyu, Sakya and Gelug.
7. Japan preserves a separate tantric line in Shingon, founded by Kukai, which shows that these methods travelled well beyond Tibet.

Buddhism in the West

1. Buddhism reached the West by several routes at once, and Western communities still differ according to which route brought them.
2. Scholarly translation came first. The Pali Text Society, founded by T. W. Rhys Davids in 1881, put the canon into English and shaped an early Western picture of Buddhism as rational and text-based.
3. Migration brought living communities rather than books. Chinese, Japanese and later Vietnamese, Thai and Sri Lankan immigrants built temples serving their own populations, often with priorities quite unlike those of convert groups.
4. Japanese Zen reached a wide Western readership through D. T. Suzuki, and Tibetan teachers arrived in numbers after the Dalai Lama left Tibet in 1959.
5. Convert Buddhism has adapted the tradition noticeably. It is largely lay-led, built around meditation and retreats rather than merit-making, and it generally gives women equal standing.
6. Some adaptations drop the religious frame altogether. Secular mindfulness programmes, notably Jon Kabat-Zinn's stress reduction course, use Buddhist techniques in clinics without any doctrine attached.
7. Buddhists disagree about how to judge all this. Some read adaptation as upaya doing its work, and others hold that a Buddhism without rebirth, merit and the sangha has given up more than it has gained.