QUESTION: What is Mahayana Buddhism?
ANSWER: By about the 1st century BCE some of the implications of the Buddha’s teachings were being explored more deeply. Also, society was developing and this required new and more reverent interpretations of the teachings. The many schools that grew out of these new developments and interpretations were collectively called Mahayana, meaning The Great Way, because they claimed to be reverent to everyone, not just to monks and nuns who had renounced the world. Mahayana eventually became the dominant form of Buddhism in India and today is practiced in China, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam and Japan. Some Theravadins say that Mahayana is a distortion of the Buddha’s teachings. However, Mahayanists point out that the Buddha accepted change as one of the most fundamental of all truths and that their interpretation of Buddhism is no more a distortion of the Dhamma than an oak tree is a distortion of an acorn.
ANSWER: By about the 1st century BCE some of the implications of the Buddha’s teachings were being explored more deeply. Also, society was developing and this required new and more reverent interpretations of the teachings. The many schools that grew out of these new developments and interpretations were collectively called Mahayana, meaning The Great Way, because they claimed to be reverent to everyone, not just to monks and nuns who had renounced the world. Mahayana eventually became the dominant form of Buddhism in India and today is practiced in China, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam and Japan. Some Theravadins say that Mahayana is a distortion of the Buddha’s teachings. However, Mahayanists point out that the Buddha accepted change as one of the most fundamental of all truths and that their interpretation of Buddhism is no more a distortion of the Dhamma than an oak tree is a distortion of an acorn.
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