The Emergence of the Mahayana and the Bodhisattva Ideal

The origins of the Mahayana ("Great Vehicle") movement remain one of the most contested questions in Buddhist studies. Older scholarly narratives, following Étienne Lamotte, once described a single dramatic schism arising from lay dissatisfaction with a supposedly elitist monastic establishment, but the epigraphic and manuscript evidence assembled since the 1970s tells a messier story. Gregory Schopen's work on donative inscriptions from sites such as Sanchi and Mathura, published across the 1970s–1990s and collected in Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks (1997), found no distinct Mahayana donor community for centuries after the movement's texts began circulating, suggesting Mahayana started not as a separate sect or splinter school but as a loosely connected set of textual and devotional movements operating within existing monastic lineages (nikayas) shared with non-Mahayana Buddhists. The earliest Mahayana sutras, including the Astasahasrika Prajnaparamita and the Lotus Sutra (Saddharmapundarika), were composed in stages from roughly the 1st century BCE through the first centuries CE, first surviving largely in Gandhari and Sanskrit fragments and then in Chinese translations, the earliest by Lokaksema at Luoyang around 168–189 CE.