Mahāvihāra
A tradition no longer extant within Theravāda.
Mahāvihāra is recorded within Theravāda and is no longer extant.
Origin
No founding year is given below, because the sources read do not agree on one and a date has not been chosen for them. One of the three ancient Sri Lankan monastic fraternities; described as established early and conservative. Swearer records that the Mahāvihāra lineage became normative throughout Southeast Asia and was the tradition other regions adopted. Marked extinct as a distinct competing fraternity, since it absorbed the others rather than persisting alongside them.
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Citation
English
The language and the date you read it belong in the citation: this corpus is multilingual and articles are revised after publication.
John Shaqi. “Mahāvihāra.” English version. 11 August 2026. https://johnshaqi.com/articles/sect-mahavihara.
@misc{johnshaqi-sect-mahavihara-en,
author = {John Shaqi},
title = {Mahāvihāra},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {English version},
url = {https://johnshaqi.com/articles/sect-mahavihara},
note = {Accessed n.d.}
}The word count is counted from this edition. The minute estimate uses 238 words a minute, the silent reading rate for English non-fiction reported by Brysbaert (2019). The Urdu, Hindi and Roman Urdu editions carry a word count and no estimate, because no comparable rate has been published for those scripts.