Mahāyāna
A living tradition within Buddhism. The disagreements in the sources are shown rather than settled.
Mahāyāna is a living tradition within Buddhism. Also written Great Vehicle.
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. No founder and no founding date. Neumaier reports questions beginning to emerge 'around the beginning of the Common Era among numerous sects', consolidation of ideas by the 2nd century CE particularly through the Perfection of Wisdom sūtras and the works of Nāgārjuna, and a conventional dating of c. 200 CE. These are approximations offered by the source, not a founding event.
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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. “Mahāyāna.” English version. 11 August 2026. https://johnshaqi.com/articles/sect-mahayana.
@misc{johnshaqi-sect-mahayana-en,
author = {John Shaqi},
title = {Mahāyāna},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {English version},
url = {https://johnshaqi.com/articles/sect-mahayana},
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.