Sarvāstivāda
A tradition no longer extant within Sthaviravāda (Sthavira nikāya). The disagreements in the sources are shown rather than settled.
Sarvāstivāda is recorded within Sthaviravāda (Sthavira nikāya) and is no longer extant. Also written Sarvastivadin.
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 or founding date is given in the sources consulted. Named by Cox among the schools of Sthavira descent, and by the Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions as one of the four chief early schools.
Continue reading this article
Sign in free to read in full. Become a member to join the discussion without limits.
Sign in free to read- ✓Read every article
- ✓Comment and reply (up to 100 words, 10/month)
- ✓Browse the community
- ✓Reader badge
- ✓
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. “Sarvāstivāda.” English version. 11 August 2026. https://johnshaqi.com/articles/sect-sarvastivada.
@misc{johnshaqi-sect-sarvastivada-en,
author = {John Shaqi},
title = {Sarvāstivāda},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {English version},
url = {https://johnshaqi.com/articles/sect-sarvastivada},
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.